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CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I. 

PAOB 

A. Poet’s Cuildhood 7 

CHAPTER II. 

The Tailors’ Work-room ^ ^ 21 

CHAPTER III. 

Sandy Mackaye 3^ 

%■ 

CHAPTER IV 

Tailors and Soldiers 42 

CHAPTER V. 

The Skeptic’s Mother 52 

CHAPTER VI. 

The Dulwich Gallery ; gO 

CHAPTER VII. 

First Love 72 

CHAPTER VHI. ' , • 

Light in a Dark Place 82 

CHAPTER IX. 

Poetry and Poets ' 90 

CHAPTER X. 

How Folks turn Chartists 9*0 


IV 


CONI ENTS. 


CHAPTER XL 

rAoa 

“ Tnii Yard where the Gentlemen Live” 109 


Cambridge 

CHAPTER XH. 

118 


CHAPTER XIIL 


The Lost Idol Found 127 


A Cathedral Town . , 

CHAPTER XrV. 

148 


CHAPTER XY. 


The Man of Science 


Cultivated Women . 

CHAPTER XVL 

160 

Sermons and Stones . 

CHAPTER XVH. 

My Fall 

CHAPTER XVHL 

169 

Short and Sad 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Pegasus in Harness . . 

CHAPTER XX. 

The Sweater’s Den . 

CHAPTER XXL 


CHAPTER XXH. 

An Emersonian Sermon 196 

CHAPTER XXHL 


The Freedom of the Press 


204 


CONTENTS. 


V 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

PlOB 

T HE Townsman’s Sermon to the Gownsman 210 

CHAPTER XXV. 

A True Nobleman 220 


CHAPTER XXVI. 

The Triumphant Author 225 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

The Plush Breeches Tragedy 231 

CHAPTER XXVm. 

The Men who are Eaten 242 

CHAPTER XXIX. 


The Trial 260 

CHAPTER XXX. 

Prison Thoughts 269 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

The New Church 279 

CHAPTER XXXH. 


The Tower of Babel 


282 



304 


The Lowest Deep 310 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 


Dream Land 


319 


CONTENTS. 


Vi 


CHAPTER XXXVJT 


The True Demagogue 336 


\ CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

Miracles and Science 348 


CHAPTER XXXIX 

Nemesis ' 354 


CHAPTER XL. 


Priests and People 


359 


CHAPTER XLl v P' 

Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood 361 



-'r " 



/• 













ALTON LOCKE, 

TAILOR AND POET. 


CHAPTER, I. 

A POET'S CHILDHOOD. 

I AM a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, 
the Highlands'and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even 
the Surrey hills, of whose loveliness I have heard so much, 
are to me a distant fairy-land, whoso gleaming ridges I am 
worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two 
journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England i.i 
bounded by the horizon which encircles Richmond hill. 

My earliest recollections are of a suburban street ; of its 
jumble of little shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some 
fresh variety of capricious ugliness ; the little scraps of garden 
before the doors, with their dusty, stunted lilacs and balsam 
poplars, were my only forests ; my only wild animals, the 
dingy, merry sparrows, who quareled fearlessly on my window- 
sill, ignorant of trap or gun. From my earliest childhood, 
through long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight bright- 
ened into dawn, and the glaring lamps grew pale, I used 
to listen, with a pleasant awe,, to the ceaseless roll of the 
market-wagons, bringing up to the great city the treasures 
of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for 
which i have yearned all my life in vain. They seemed to 
my boyish fancy mysterious messengers from another world, 
the silent, lonely night, in which they were the only moving 
things, added to the wonder. I used to get out of bed to gaze 
at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish women who 
attended them, their labor among verdant plants and rich 
brown mould, on breezy slopes, under God’s own clear sky. 
I fancied that they learnt what I knew I should have learnt 
there ; T knew not then that “ the eye only sees that which 


8 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


H brings with it the power of seeing.” When will their eyes 
be opened 1 When will priests go forth into the highw’ays 
and the hedges, and preach to the plowman and the gipsy 
the blessed news, that there, too, in every thicket and fallow 
field, is the house of God, there, too, the gate of Heaven ! 

I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is 
God’s gift. He made me one, that I might learn to feel for 
poor wretches who sit stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, 
drinking in disease with every breath — bound in their prison- 
house of brick and iron, with their own funeral pall hanging 
over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke, from 
their cradle to their grave. I have drank of the cup of which 
they drink. And so I have learnt — if, indeed, I have learnt 
— to be a poet — a poet of the people. That honor, surely, was 
worth buying with asthma, and rickets, and consumption, and 
weakness, and — w'orst of all to me — with ugliness. It was 
God’s purpose about me ; and, therefore, all circumstances 
combined to imprison me in London. I used once, when I 
worshiped circumstance, to fancy it my curse. Fate’s injustice 
to me, which kept me from developing my genius, and asserting 
my rank among poets. I longed to escape to glorious Italy 
or some other southern climate, where natural beauty would 
have become the very element which I breathed ; and yet, 
what would have come of that? Should I not, as nobler 
spirits than I have done, have idled away my life in Elysian 
dreams, singing out like a bird into the air, inarticulately, pur- 
poseless, for mere joy and fullness of heart ; and taking no 
share in the terrible questionings, the terrible strugglings of 
this great, awful, blessed time — feeling no more the pulse of 
the great heart of England stirring me? I used, as I said, to 
call it the curse of circumstance that I was a sickly, decrepit 
Cockney. My mother used to tell me that it was the cross 
which God had given me to bear. I know now that she 
was right there. She used to say that my disease was God’s 
will. I do not think, though, that she spoke right there also. 
I think that it was the will of the w^orld and of the devil, ol’ 
man’s avarice, and laziness, and ignorance. And so would my 
readers, perhaps, had they seen the shop in the city Avhere I 
was born and nursed, wdth its little garrets reeking with human 
breath, its kitchens and areas with noisome sewers. A sani- 
tary reformer would not be long in guessing the cause of my 
unhealthiness. He would not rebuke me — nor would she, 
sweet soul ! now that she is at rest in bliss — for my wild 
longings to escape, for my envying the very flies and sparrows 


ALTON LOOKK, TAILOR AND POET. 


tlibir wings that T might flee miles away into the country, and 
breathe the air of heaven once, and die. I have had my wish. 
[ have made two journeys far away into the country, and they 
have been enough for me. 

My mother was a widow. My father, whom I can not rec- 
ollect, was a small retail tradesman in the city. He was un- 
fortunate ; and when he died my mother came down, and 
lived penuriously enough, I knew not how till I grew older, 
down in that same suburban street. She had been brought 
up an Independent. After my father’s death she became a 
Baptist, from conscientious scruples. She considered the 
Baptists, as I do, as the only sect who thoroughly embody 
the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do, an absurd and 
impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children of 
the devil till they have been consciously “converted,” to bap- 
tize unconscious infants and give them the sign of God’s mer- 
cy on the mere chance of that mercy being intended for them. 
When God had proved, by converting them, that they were 
not reprobate and doomed to hell by His absolute and eternal 
will, then, and not till then, dare man ba’ptize them into His 
name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself, 
and call it “ charity.” So, though we had both been christened 
during my father’s lifetime, she purposed to have us rebaptized, 
if ever that happened — which, in her sense of the word, never 
happened, I am afraid, to me. 

She gloried in her dissent; for she was sprung from old 
Puritan blood, which had flowed again and again beneath the 
knife of Star-Chamber butchers, and on the battle fields of 
Naseby and Sedgemoor. And on winter evenings she used 
to sit with her Bibla on her knee, while I and my little sistei 
Susan stood beside her and listened to the stories of Gideon 
and Barak, and Samson and Jephthah; till her eye kindled 
up and her thoughts passed forth from that old Hebrew time 
home into those English times which she fancied, and not un- 
truly, like them. And we used to shudder, and yet listen with 
a strange fascination, as she told us how her ancestor called 
his seven sons ofi' their small Cambridge farm, and horsed and 
armed them himself to follow behind Cromwell, and smite 
kings and prelates with “the sword of the Lord and of Gid- 
eon.” Whether she were right or wrong, what is it to me 1 
W^hat is it now to her, thank God ? But those stories, and 
the strict, stern Puritan education, learnt from the Independ- 
ents, and not the Baptists, which accompanied them, had 
their cfTect on mo for good and ill. 


10 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


My mother moved by rule and method ; by God’s law, as 
she considered, and that only. She seldom smiled. Her word 
was absolute. She never commanded twice, without punish* 
ing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness in 
her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But 
she thought herself as much hound to keep down all tender- 
ness as if she had been some ascetic of the middle ages — so do 
extreJmes meet ! It was “ carnal,” she considered. She had 
as yet no right to have any “spiritual affection” for us. We (i 
were still “ children of wrath and of the devil” — not yet “ con- 
vinced of sin,” “converted, born again.” She had no more ; 
spiritual bond with us, she thought, than she had with a 
heathen or a Papist. She dared not even pray for our con- 
version, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. For 
though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear 
logical sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had 
it not been decided from all eternity ? We were elect, or we 
were reprobate. Could her prayers alter that ? If He had 
chosen us, He would call us in his own good time : and if 
not — . Only, again and again, as I afterward discovered 
from a journal of hers, she used to beseech God with agonized 
tears to set her mind at rest by revealing to her His will to- 
ward us. For that comfort she could at least rationally pray. 
But she received no answer. Poor, beloved mother ! If thou 
couldst not read the answer written in every flower and every 
sunbeam, written in the very fact of our existence here at all, 
what answer would have sufficed thee % 

And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest watch over 
our morality. Fear, of course, was the only motive she em- 
ployed ; for how could our still carnal understandings he af- 
fected with love to God ? And love to herself was too paltry 
and temporary to be urged by one who knew that her life was 
uncertain, and who was always trying to go down to the 
deepest eternal ground and reason of every thing, and take 
her stand upon that. So our god, or gods rather, till we were 
twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten commandments, 
and public opinion. Yet under them, not they, but something 
deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it 
natural character, conformation of the spirit — conformation oi 
the brain, if you like, if you are a scientific man and a phre- 
nologist. I never yet could dissect and map out my own being, 
or my neighbor’s, as you analysts do. To me, I myself, ay, 
and each person round me, seem one inexplicable whole ; to 
take away a single faculty whereof, is to destroy the harmony. 


ALTON LOOKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


11 


the meaning, the life of all the rest. That there is a duality 
in ns — a lifelong battle between flesh and spirit — we all, alas I 
know well enough ; but which is flesh and which is spirit, 
what philosophers in these days can tell us 1 Still less had 
we two found out any such duality or discord in ourselves ; for 
we were gentle and obedient children. The pleasures of the 
world did not tempt us. We did not know of their existence , 
and no foundlings educated in a nunnery ever grew up in more 
virginal and spotless innocence — if ignorance be such — than 
did Susan and I. •. 

The narrowness of my sphere of observation only concen- 
trated the faculty into greater strength. The few natural 
objects which I met — and they, of course, constituted my 
whole outer world (for art and poetry were tabooed both by 
my rank and my mother’s sectarianism, and the study of hu- 
man beings only develops itself as the boy grows into the 
man) — these few natural objects, I say, I studied with intense 
keenness. I knew every leaf and flower in the little front 
garden ; every cabbage and rhubarb-plant in Battersea-fields 
was wonderful and beautiful to me. Clouds and water I 
1| learnt to delight in, from my occasional lingerings on Batter- 
sea-bridge, and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting 
above rich meadows and wooded gardens, to me a forbidden 
El Dorado. 

I brought home wild-flowers and chance beetles and butter- 
flies, and pored over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but 
of a poet. They were to me God’s angels, shining in coats of 
mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I envied them their 
beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the 
simple tenderness of a child’s conscience, that it was wrong to 
rob them of the liberty for which I pined — to take them away 
from the beautiful broad country whither T longed to follow 
them ; and I used to keep them a day or two, and then, re- 
gretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the first 
opportunity, with many compunctions of heart, when, as gen- 
erally happened, they had been starved to death in the mean 
time. 

They were my only recreations after the hours of the small 
lay-school at the neighboring chapel, where I learnt to read, 
write, and sum ; except, now, and then, a London walk, with 
my mother holding my hand tight the whole way. She 
would have hoodwinked me, stopped my ears with cotton, and 
led me in a string — kind, careful soul ! — if it had been 
reasonably safe on a crowded pavement, so fearful was she lesf 


12 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


1 should be polluted by some chance sight or sound of the 
Babylon which she feared and hated — almost as much as she 
did the bishops. 

The only books which I knew were the Pilgrim’s Progress 
and the Bible. The former was my Shakespeare, my Dante, 
my Vedas, by which I explained every fact and phenomenon 
of life. London was the city of Destruction, from which I 
was to flee ; I was Christian ; the Wicket of the way of Life 
1 had strangely identified with the turnpike at Battersea- 
bridge end ; and the rising ground of Moftlake and Wimble- 
don was the land of Beulah — the Enchanted Mountains of 
the Shepherds. If I could once get there, I w'^as saved ; — a 
carnal view, perhaps, and a childish one ; but there was a dim 
meaning and human reality in it nevertheless. 

As for the Bible, I knew nothing of it really, beyond the 
Old Testament. Indeed, the life of Christ had little chance 
of becoming interesting to me. My mother had given me 
formally to understand that it spoke of matters too deep for 
me , that, “ till converted the natural man could not understand 
the things of God:” and I obtained little more explanatioi.: 
of it from the two unintelligible, dreary sermons to which I 
listened every dreary Sunday, in terror lest a chance shuffle 
of rny feet, or a hint of drowsiness — the natural result of the 
stifling gallery and glaring windows and gaslights — should 
bring down a lecture and a punishment when I returned 
home. Oh, those sabbaths !” — days, not of rest, but utter 
weariness, when the beetles and the flowers were put by, and 
there v'as nothing to fill up the long vacuity but books of 
w'hich I could not understand a word ; when play, laughter, 
or even a stare out of window at the sinful, merry, sabbath- 
breaking promenaders, were all forbidden, as if the command- 
ment had run, “In it thou shalt take no manner of amuse- 
ment, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter.” By what strange 
ascetic perversion has that got to mean “ keeping holy the 
sabbath- day ?” 

Yet there was an hour’s relief in the evening, when either 
my mother told us Old Testament stories, or some preacher 
or two came in to supper after meeting ; and I used to sit in 
the corner and listen to their talk ; not that I understood a 
word, but the mere struggle to understand — the mere watching 
my mother’s earnest face — my pride in the reverent flattery 
with which the worthy men addressed her as “ a mother in 
Israel,” were enough to fill up the blank for me till bed-time. 

Of “vital Christianity” I heard much; but, with all my 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR A'ND POET. 


13 


etibrts, could find out nothing. Indeed, it did not seem inter- 
esting enough to tempt me to find out much.'^ It seemed a set 
of doctrines, believing in which was to have a magical effect 
on people, by saving them from the everlasting torture due to 
sins and temptations which I had never felt. Now and then, 
believing, in obedience to my mother’s assurances, and the 
solemn prayers of the ministers about me, that I was a child 
of hell, and a lost and miserable sinner, I used to have ac- 
cesses of terror, and fancy that I should surely wake next 
morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a 
moment into the fire, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, 
have done, not only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see 
if it would be so very dreadfully painful ; with what conclu- 
sions the reader may judge. . . . Still, I could not keep up the 
excitement. Why should I ? — The fear of pain is not the 
fear of sin, that I know of ; and, indeed, the thing was unreal 
altogether in my case, and my heart, my common sense re- 
belled against it again and again ; till at last I got a terrible 
whipping for taking my little sister’s part, and saying that if 
she was to die — so gentle, and obedient, and affectionate ar 
she was — God would be very unjust in sending her to hell- 
fire, and that I was quite certain He would do no such thing — 
unless He were the Devil : an opinion which I have since seen 
no reason to change. The confusion between the King of 
Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared up, thank God, 
since then ! 

So I was whipped and put to bed — the whipping altering 
my secret heart just about as much as the dread of hell- fire 
did. 

I speak as a Christian man — an orthodox Churchman (if 
you require that shibboleth). Was I so very wrong? What 
was there in the idea of religion which was presented to me 
at home to captivate me ? What was the use of a child’s 
hearing of “ God’s great love manifested in the scheme of re- 
demption,” when he heard, in the same breath, that the effects 
of that redemption were practically confined only to one hu- 
man being out of a thousand, and that the other nine hundred 
and ninety-nine were lost and damned from their birth-hour 
to all eternity — not only by the absolute will and reprobation 
of God (though that infernal blasphemy I heard often enough), 
but also, putting that out of the question, by the mere fact of 
being born of Adam’s race. And this to a generation to whom 
God’s love shines out in every tree, and flower, and hedge-sido 
bird ; to whom the daily discoveries of science are revealing 


14 


ALTON LOCKE, lAILOR AND POET. 


that love in every mieroscopic animalcule which peoples the 
stagnant pool ! This to working men, whose craving is only 
for some idea which shall give equal hopes, claims, and deliver- 
ances, to all mankind alike ! This to working men, who, in 
the smiles of their innocent children, see the heaven which 
they have lost — the messages of baby-cherubs made in God’s 
own image ! This to me, to whom every butterfly, every look 
at my little sister, contradicted the lie ! You may say that 
such thoughts were too deep for a child ; that I am ascribing 
to my boyhood the skepticism of my manhood ; but it is not 
so ; and what went on in my mind goes on in the minds of 
thousands. It is the cause of the contempt into which not 
merely sectarian Protestantism, hut Christianity altogether, 
has fallen, in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, 
who anathematize us for wandering into Unitarianism — you, 
you have driven us thither. You must find some explanation 
of the facts of Christianity more in accordance with the truths 
which we do know, and will live and die for, or you can never 
hope to make us Christians ; or, if we do return to the true 
fold, it will be as I returned, after long, miserable years of 
darkling error, to a higher truth than most of you have yet 
learned to preach. 

But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and 
soul. I learnt from them lessons which I never wish to un- 
learn. Whatever else I saw about them, this I saw — that 
they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and injustice 
from which the child’s heart — “child of the devil” though 
you may call him — instinctively, and, as I believe, by a 
divine inspiration, revolts. Moses leading his people out of ] 
Egypt ; Gideon, Barak, and Samson, slaying their oppressors ; i 
David hiding in the mountains from the tyrant, with his little 
band of those who had fled from the oppressions of an aristoc- ■ 
racy of Nabals ; Jehu executing God’s vengeance on the kings | 
— they were my heroes, my models ; they mixed themselves i 
up with the dim legends about the Reformation martyrs, [) 
Cromwell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth, which I had ' 
heard at my mother’s knee. Not that the perennial oppression < 
of the masses, in all ages and countries, had yet risen on me T 
as an awful, torturing, fixed idea. I fancied, poor fool ! that ■ 
tyranny was the exception, and not the rule. But it was the j 
mere sense of abstract pity and justice which was delighted in : 
me. I thought that these were old fairy tales, such as never ' 
need be realized again. I learnt otherwise in after years. 

I have often wondered since, why all can not read the same 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POEl. 


15 


lesson as I did in those old Hebrew Scriptures — that they, of 
all books in the world, have been wrested into proofs of the 
divine right of kings, the eternal necessity of slavery ! But the 
eye only sees what it brings with it, the power of seeing. The 
upper classes, from their first day at school to their last day at 
college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and Mara- 
thon, of freedom and of the old republics. And what comes 
of it ? No more than their tutors know will come of it, when 
they thrust into the boys’ hands books which give the lie in 
every page to their own political superstitions. 

But when I was just turned of thirteen, an altogether new 
fairly-land was opened to me by some missionary tracts and 
iournals, which were lent to my mother by the ministers. 
Pacific coral islands and volcanoes, cocoa-nut groves and 
bananas, graceful savages with paint and feathers — what an 
El Dorado ! How I devoured them and dreamt of them, and 
went there in fancy, and preached small sermons as I lay in 
bed at night to Tahitians and New Zealanders, though I con- 
fess my spiritual eyes were, just as my physical eyes would 
have been, far more busy with the scenery than with the souls 
of my audience. However, that was the place for me, I saw 
clearly. And one day, I recollect it well, in the little dingy, 
foul, reeking, twelve-fbot-square back yard, where huge smoky 
party-walls shut out every breath of air and almost all the 
light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt and 
the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the 
dirty fluid which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with 
insects, to be renewed only three times in the seven days, some 
of the great larva? and kicking monsters which made up a 
large item in my list of wonders : all of a sudden the horror 
of the place came over me ; those grim prison-walls above, 
with their canopy of lurid smoke ; the dreary, sloppy, broken 
pavement ; the horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools ; the 
utter w^ant of form, color, life, in the whole place, crushed me 
down, without my being able to analyze my feelings as I can 
now ; and then came over me that dream of Pacific Islands, 
and the free, open sea ; and I slid down from my perch, and 
bursting into tears threw myself upon my knees in the court, 
and prayed aloud to God to let me be a missionary. 

Half fearfully I let out my wishes to my mother when she 
came home. She gave me no answer ; but, as I found out 
afterward — too late, alas ! for her, if not for me — she, like 
Mary, had laid up all these things, and treasured them in 
her heart.” 


16 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


You may guess then my delight when, a few days after- 
ward, I heard that a real live missionary was coming to take 
tea with us. A man who had actually been in New Zea- 
land ! — the thought was rapture. I painted him to myself 
over and over again ; and when, after the first burst of fancy, 
I recollected that he might possibly not have adopted the 
native costume of that island, or, if he had, that perhaps it 
would look too strange for him to wear it about London, I 
‘ettled within myself that he was to be a tall venerable-looking 
man, like the portraits of old Puritan divines which adorned 
our day-room ; and as I had heard that “ he was was power- 
ful in prayer,” I adorned his right-hand with that mystic 
weapon “ all-prayer,” with which Christian, when all other 
means had failed, finally vanquishes the fiend — which instru- 
ment, in my mind, was somewhat after the model of an 
infernal sort of bill or halbert — all hooks, edges, spikes, and 
crescents — which I had passed, shuddering, once, in the , 
hand of an old suit of armor in Wardour-street. 

He came — and with him the two ministers who often 
drank tea with my mother ; both of whom, as they played 
some small part in the drama of my after-life, I may as well 
describe here. The elder was a little, sleek, silver-haired old 
man, with a bland, weak face, just like a white rabbit. He 
loved me, and I loved him too, for there were always lollipops 
in his pocket for me and Susan Had his head been equal to 
his heart ! — but what has been was to be — and the dissenting 
clergy, with a few noble exceptions among the Independents, 
are not the strong men of the day — none know that better 
than the workmen. The old man’s name was Bowyer. The 
other, Mr. Wigginton, was a younger man ; tall, grim, dark, 
bilious, with a narrow forehead, retreating suddenly from his 
eyebrows up to a conical peak of black hair over his ears. 
He preached “higher doctrine,” i.e., more fatalist and anti- 
nomian than his gentler colleague — and, having also a sten- 
torian voice, was much the greater favorite at the chapel. I 
hated him — and if any man ever deserved hatred, he did. 

Well, they came. My heart was in my mouth as I opened 
the door to them, and sunk back again to the very lowest 
depths of my inner man when my eyes fell on the face and 
figure of the missionary — a squat, red-faced, pig-eyed, low- 
browed man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very 
ears ; sensuality, conceit, and cunning marked on every feat- 
ure — an innate vulgarity, from which the artisan and the 
child recoil with an instinct as true, perhaps truer, than that 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


17 


of the courtier, showing itself in every tone and motion — I 
shrunk into a corner, so crest-fallen that I could not even exert 
myself to hand round the bread-and-butter, for which I got 
duly scolded afterward. Oh ! that man ! — how he bawled 
and contradicted, and laid down the law, and spoke to my 
mother in a fondling, patronizing way, which made me, I 
knew not why, boil over wdth jealousy and indignation. How' 
he filled his teacup half full of the white sugar to buy which 
my mother had curtailed her yesterday’s dinner — how he 
drained the few remaining drops of the three-pennyworth of 
cream, with which Susan was stealing ofF, to keep it as an 
unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast the next morn- 
ing — how he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of 
his converts, but as a planter might of his slaves ; overlaying 
all his unintentional confessions of his own greed and prosper- 
ity, with cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to see through, 
while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a 
man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with 
a jumble cf old English picked out of our translation of the 
New Testament. Such was the man I saw. I don’t deny 
that all are not like him. I believe there are noble men oi 
all denominations, doing their best according to their light, 
all over the world ; but such was one I saw — and the men 
who are sent home to plead the missionary cause, whatever 
the men may be like who stay behind and work, are, from 
my small experience, too often such. It appears to me to be 
the rule that many of those who go abroad as missionaries, go 
simply because they are men of such inferior powers and at- 
tainments that if they staid in England they would starve. 

Three parts of his conversation, after all, was made up of 
abuse of the missionaries of the Church of England, not for 
doing nothing, but for being so much more successful than 
his own sect ; accusing them, in the same breath, of being 
just of the inferior type of which he was himself, and also of 
being mere University fine gentlemen. Really, I did not 
wonder, upon his own showing, at the savages preferring them 
to him ; and I was pleased to hear the old white-headed 
minister gently interpose at the end of one of his tirades — 
“ We must not be jealous, my brother, if the Establishment 
has discovered what we, I hope, shall find out some day, that 
it is not wise to draft our missionaries from the ofTscouring of 
the ministry, and serve God with that which costs us nothing 
except the expense of providing for them beyond seas.” 

There was somewhat of a roguish twinkle in the old man’s 


18 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

eye as he said it, which emboldened me to whisper a questioi. 
to him. 

“ Why is it, sir, that in old times the heathens used to 
(Tucify the missionaries and burn them, and now they give 
them beautiful farms, and build them houses, and carry them 
about on their backs ?” 

The old man seemed a little puzzled, and so did the com- 
pany, to whom he smilingly retailed my question. 

As nobody seemed inclined to offer a solution, I ventured 
one myself. 

“ Perhaps the heathens are grown better than they used 
to be ?” 

“The heart of man,” answered the tall, dark minister, “is, 
and ever was, equally at enmity with God.” 

“ Then, perhaps,” I ventured again, “ what the mission- 
aries preach now is not quite the same as what the mission- 
aries used to preach in St. Paul’s time, and so the heathens 
are not so angry at it ?” 

My mother looked thunder at me, and so did all except my 
white-headed friend, who said, gently enough — 

“It may be that the child’s words come from God.” 

Whether they did or not, the child took very good care to 
speak no more words till he was alone with his mother ; and 
then finished off that disastrous evening by a punishment for 
the indecency of saying, before his little sister, that he thought 
it “ a great pity the missionaries taught black people to wear 
ugly coats and trowsers ; they must have looked so much 
handsomer running about with nothing on but feathers and 
strings of shells.” 

So the missionary dream died out of me, by a foolish and 
illogical antipathy enough ; though, after all, it was a child 
of my imagination only, not of my heart ; and the fancy, 
having bred it, was able to kill it also. And David becanie 
my ideal. To be a shepherd-boy, and sit among beautiful 
mountains, and sing hymns of my own making, and kill lions 
and bears, with now and then the chance of a stray giant — 
what a glorious life ! And if David slew giants with a sling 
and a stone, why should not I ? — at all events, one ought to 
know how ; so I made a sling out of an old garter and some 
string, and began to practice in the little back-yard. But 
my first shot broke my neighbor’s window, value seven-pence, 
and the next flew back in my face, and cut my head open ^ 
so I was sent supperless to bed for a week, till the seven-pence 
had been duly saved out of my hungry stomach — and, on the 


ALTON-LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 19 

whole, I found the hymn-writing side of David’s character 
the more feasible ; so I tried, and with much brainsbeating, 
committed the following lines to a scrap of dirty paper. And 
it was strangely significant, that in this, my first attempt, 
there was an instinctive denial of the very doctrine of “ par- 
ticular redemption,” which I had been hearing all my life, 
and an instinctive yearning after the very Being in whom I 
had been told I had “ no part nor lot ” till I was “ converted.” 
Here they are. I am not ashamed to call them — doggrel 
though they he — an inspiration from Him of whom th'^y 
speak. If not from Him, good readers, from vrhom ? 

Jesus, He loves one and all; 

Jesus, He loves ehildren small ; 

Their souls are sitting round His feet. 

On high, before His mercy-seat. 

When on earth He walked in shame. 

Children small unto Him came ; 

At his feet they knelt and prayed, 

On their heads His hands He laid. 

Came a spirit on them then. 

Greater than of mighty men ; 

A spirit gentle, meek, and mild, 

A spirit good for king and child. 

Oh ! that spirit give to me, 

Jesus, Lord, where’er I be ! 

So— 


But I did not finish them, not seeing very clearly what to 
do with that spirit when I obtained it ; for, indeed, it seemed 
a much finer thing to fight material Apollyons with material 
swords of iron, like my friend Christian, or to go bear and lion 
hunting with David, than to convert heathens by meekness — 
at least, if true meekness was at all like that of the missionary 
whom I had lately seen. 

1 showed the verses in secret to my little sister. My 
mother heard us singing them together, and extorted, grimly 
enough, a confession of the authorship. I expected to be 
punished for them (I was accustomed weekly to be punished 
for all sorts of deeds and words, of the harmfulness of which I 
had not a notion). It was, therefore, an agreeable surprise 
when the old minister, the next Sunday evening, patted my 
head, and praised me for them. 

“ A hopeful sign of young grace, brother,” said he to the 
dark, tall man. “May we behold here an infant Timothy I” 

“ Bad doctrine, brother, in that first line — had doctrine, 


20 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


whioli 1 am sure he did not learn from our excellent sister 
here. Remember, my boy, henceforth, that Jesus does 7iot 
love one and all — not that I am angry with you. The carnal 
mind can not be expected to understand divine things, any 
more than the beasts that perish. Nevertheless, the blessed 
message of the Gospel stands true, that Christ loves none but 
His Bride, the Church. His merits, my poor child, extend to 
none but the elect. Ah I my dear sister Locke, how delight- 
ful to think of the narrow way of discriminating grace ! 
How it enhances the believer’s view of his own exceeding 
privileges, to remember that there be few that be saved !” 

I said nothing. I thought myself only too lucky to escape 
so well from the danger of having done any thing out of my 
own head. But somehow Susan and I never altered it when 
we sang it to ourselves. 

I thought it necessary for the sake of those who might read 
my story, to string together these few scattered recollections 
of my boyhood — to give, as it were, some sample of the 
cotyledon leaves of my young life-plant, and of the soil in 
* which it took root, ere it was transplanted — but I will not 
forestall my sorrows. After all, they have been but types of 
the woes of thousands who “die and give no sign.” Those 
to whom the struggles of every, even the meanest, human 
being are scenes of an awful drama, every incident of which 
is to be noted w'ith reverent interest, will not find them void 
of meaning ; while the life which opens in my next chapter 
is, perhaps, full enough of mere dramatic interest (and w'hoso 
life is not, were it but truly written ?) to amuse merely as a 
novel. Ay, grim and real is the action and suffering which 
begins with my next page — as you yourself would have found, 
high-born reader (if such chance to light upon this story), had 
you found yourself at fifteen, after a youth of convent-like ‘ 
seclusion, settled, apparently for life — in a tailor’s workshop. 

Ay — laugh ! we tailors can quote poetry as well as make 
your court-dresses : 

You sit in a cloud and sing, like pictured angels, 

And say the world runs smooth — while right below 
Welters the black fermenting heap of griefs 
Whereon your state is built ^ 





CHAPTER II. 

THE TAILORS’ WORK-ROOM. 

Have you done laughing ? Then I will tell you how the 
thing came to pass. 

My father had a brother, who had steadily risen in life, in 
proportion as my father fell. They had both begun life in a 
grocer’s shop. My father saved enough to marry, when of 
middle age, a woman of his own years, and set up a little 
shop, where there were far too many such already, in the 
hope — to him, as to the rest of the world, quite just and in- 
nocent — of drawing away as much as possible of his neighbors’ 
custom. He failed, died — as so many small tradesmen do — 
of bad debts and a broken heart, and left us beggars. His 
brother, more prudent, had in the mean time, risen to be fore- 
man ; then he married, on the strength of his handsome per- 
son, his master’s blooming widow ; and rose and rose, year by 
year, till, at the time of which I speak, he was owner of a 
lirst-rate grocery establishment in the city, and a pleasant 
villa near Herne Hill, and had a son a year or two older than 
myself, at King’s College preparing for Oxford and the Church 
— that being nowadays the approved method of converting 
a tradesman’s son into a gentleman, whereof let artisans, and 
gentlemen also take note. 

My aristocratic readers — if I ever get any, which I pray God 
I may — may be surprised at so great an inequality of fortune 
between two cousins ; but the thing is common in our class, 
[n the higher ranks, a difference in income implies none in 
.education or manners, and the poor “gentleman” is a fit 
iompanion for dukes and princes — thanks to the old usages 
»f Norman chivalry, which after all were a democratic protest 
against the sovereignty, if not of rank, at least of money. The 
Knight, however penniless, was the prince’s equal, even his 
superior, from whose hands he must receive knighthood ; and 
thu “ squire of low degree,” who honorably earned his spurs, 
rose also into that guild, whose qualifications, however bar- 
baric were still higher ones than any which the pocket gives. 
But in the commercial classes money most truly and fearfully 
“ makes the man.” A diflerence in income, as you go lower, 


22 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


makes more and more difference in the supply of the common 
necessaries of life; and worse, in education and manners, in 
all which polishes the man, till you may see often as in my 
case, one cousin an Oxford undergraduate, and the other a 
tailor’s journeyman. 

My uncle one day came down to visit us, resplendent in a 
black velvet waistcoat, thick gold chain, and acres of shirt- 
front ; and I and Susan were turned to feed on our own curi- 
osity and awe in the back-yard, while he and my mother 
were closeted together for an hour or so in the living-room. 
When he was gone, my mother called me in, and with eyes 
which would have been tearful had she allowed herself such 
a weakness before us, told me very solemnly and slowly, as if 
to impress upon me the awfulness of the matter, that I was 
to be sent to a tailor’s work-rooms the next day. 

And an awful step it was in her eyes, as she laid her hands 
on my head and murmured to herself, “ Behold, I send you 
forth as a lamb in the midst of wolves. Be ye, therefore, 
wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” And then, rising 
hastily to conceal her own emotion, fled up-stairs, where we 
could hear her throw herself on her knees by the bedside, and 
sob piteously. 

That evening was spent dolefully enough, in a sermon of 
warnings against all manner of sins and temptations, the very 
names of which I had never heard, but to which, as she in- 
formed me, I was by my fallen nature altogether prone : and 
right enough was she in so saying, though, as often happens, 
tlie temptations from which I was in real danger were just 
the ones of which she had no notion — fighting more or less 
extinct Satans, as Mr. Carlyle says, and quite unconscious of 
the real, modern, man-devouring Satan close at her elbow. 

To me, in spite of all the terror which she tried to awaken 
in me, the change was not unv/elcome ; at all events, it 
promised me food for my eyes and my ears — some escape from 
the narrow cage in which, though 1 hardly dare confess it te> 
myself, I was beginning to pine. Little I dreamt to what 
a darker cage I was to be translated! Not that I accuse 
my uncle of neglect or cruelty, though the thing was alto- 
gether of his commanding. He was as generous to us as so- 
ciety required him to be. We were entirely dependent on 
him. as my mother told me then for the first time, for support. 
And had he not a right to dispose of my person, having bought 
it by an allowance to my mother of five-and-twenty pounds a 
year ? I did not forget that fact ; the thought of my depend- 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


23 


ence on him rankled in me, till it almost bred hatred in me 
to a man who had certainly never done or meant any thing 
to me but in kindness. For what could he make me but a 
tailor, or a shoemaker ? A pale, consumptive, rickety, weak- 
ly boy, all forehead and no muscle — have not clothes and 
ihoes been from time immemorial the appointed work of 
such % The fact that that weakly frame is generally 
compensated by a proportionally increased activity of brain, 
is too unimportant to enter into the calculations of the great 
King Laissez-faire. Well, my dear Society, it is you that 
suffer for the mistake^ after all, more than we. If you do 
tether your cleverest artisans on tailors’ shop-boards and cob- 
blers’ benches, and they — as sedentary folk will — fall a-think- 
ing, and come to strange conclusions thereby, they really ought 
to be much more thankful to you than you are to them. If 
Thomas Cooper had passed his first five-and-twenty years at 
the plough tail instead of the shoemaker’s awl, many words 
would have been left unsaid which, once spoken, working- 
men are not likely to forget 

With a beating heart I shambled along by my mother’s 
side next day to Mr. Smith’s shop, in a street off Piccadilly ; 
and stood by her side, just within the door, waiting till some 
one would condescend to speak to us, and wondering when 
the time would come when I, like the gentlemen who skip- 
ped up and down the shop, should shine glorious in patent- 
leather boCcS, and a blue satin tie sprigged with gold. 

Two personages, both equally magnificent, stood talking 
with their backs to us ; and my mother, in doubt, like myself, 
as to which of them was the tailor, at last summoned up 
courage to address the wrong one, by asking if he were 
Mr. Smith. 

The person addressed answered by a most polite smile and 
bow, and assured her that he had not that honor ; while the 
other he-he’ed, evidently a little flattered by the mistake, and 
then uttered in a tremendous voice these words — 

“ I have nothing for you, my good woman — go. Mr. 
Elliot ! how did you come to allow these people to get into 
the establishment ?” 

“My name is Locke, sir, and I was to bring my son nere 
this morning.” 

“ Oh — ah ! — Mr. Elliot, see to these persons. As I was 
saying, my lard, the crimson velvet suit, about thirty-five 
guineas. By-the-by, that coat ours ? I thought so — idea 
grand and light — masses well broken — very fine chiaroscuro 


24 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

about the whole — aii aristocratic wrinkle just above the hipa 
— which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend Mr. 
Cooke really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the 
door dummy, my lard, should be confined to the regions of the 
Strand. Mr. Elliot, W'here are you ? Just be so good as to 
show his lardship that lovely new thing in drab and bleu 
foncee. Ah ! your lardship can’t wait. Now, my good woman, 
is this the young man ?” 

“Yes,” said my mother: “and — and — God deal so with 
you, sir, as you deal with the widow and the orphan.” 

“Oh — ah — that will depend very much, I should say, on 
how the widow and the orphan deal with me. Mr. Elliot, 
take this person into the office and transact the little formal- 
ities with her. Jones, take the young man up*stairs to the 
work-room.” 

I stumbled after Mr. Jones up a dark, narrow iron stair- 
case till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the 
top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before 
me ; and here I was to work — perhaps through life ! A low 
lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odors of human 
breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of 
gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. 
On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends 
of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with 
a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. 
The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter 
air ; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, 
checkering the dreary out-look of chimney tops and smoke. 
The conductor handed me over to one of the men. 

“Here, Crossthwaite, take this younker and make a tailor 
of him. Keep him next you, and prick him up with your 
needle if he shirks.” 

He disappeared down the trap-door, and mechanically, as 
if in a dream, I sat down by the man and listened to his 
instructions, kindly enough bestowed. But I did not remain 
in peace two minutes. A burst of chatter rose as the fore- 
man vanished, and a tall, bloated, sharp-nosed young man 
next me bawled in my ear, 

“I say, young ’un, fork out the tin and pay your footing at 
Conscrumption Hospital !” 

“What do you mean V’ 

“’Aint he just green? — Down with the stumpy — a tizzy 
for a pot of half-and-half” 

“ I never drink beer.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 25 

* Then never do,” whispered the man , at my side; “aa 
arc as hell’s hell, it’s your only chance.” 

There was a fierce, deep earnestness in the tone which made 
me look up at the speaker, but the other instantly chimed in, 

“ Oh, yer dont, don’t yer, my young Father Mathy ! then 
yer’ll soon learn it here if yer want to keep yer victuals 
down.” 

“And I have promised to take my wages home to my 
mother.” 

“ O criminy ! hark to that, my coves ! here’s a chap as is 
going to take the blunt home to his mammy.” 

“ T’aint much of it the old im’ll see,” said another. “ Ven 
yer pockets it at the Cock and Bottle, my kiddy, yer won’t 
find much of it left o’ Sunday mornings.” 

“Don’t his mother know he’s out?” asked another; “and 
won’t she know it — 

Ven he’s sitting in his glory 
Half-price at the Victory. 

Oh ; no, ve never mentions her — her name is never heard. 
Certainly not, by no means. Why should it ?” 

“ Well, if yer won’t stand a pot,” quoth the tall man, “ I 
will, that’s all, and blow temperance. ‘ A short life and a 
merry one,’ says the tailor. 

The ministers talk a great deal about port, 

And they makes Cape wine very dear, 

But blow their hi’s if ever they tries 
To deprive a poor cove of his beer. 

Here, Sam, run to the Cock and Bottle for a pot of half-and 
half to my score.” 

A thin, pale lad jumped up and vanished, vidiile my tor- 
mentor turned to me : 

“ I say, young ’un, do you know why we’re nearer heaven 
here than our neighbors ?” 

“ I shouldn’t have thought so,” answered I with a naivete 
which raised a laugh, and dashed the tall man for a moment. 

“ Yer don’t ? then I’ll tell yer. Acause we’re atop of 
the house in the first place, and next place yer’ll 'die here six 
months sooner nor if yer worked in the room below. ’Aint 
that logic and science. Orator ?” appealing to Crossthwaite. 

“ Why ?” asked I. 

“Acause you get all the other floors’ stinks up here, as 
well as your own. Concentrated essence of man’s flesh, is 
this here as you're a-breathing. Cellar work-room we calls 

B 


26 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


Rheumatic Ward, because of the damp. Ground-floored 
Fever Ward — them as don’t get typhus gets dysentery, and 
them as don’t get dysentery gets typhus — your nose ’d teil 
yer why if you opened the back windy. First floor’s Ashrny 
Ward — don’t you hear ’um now through the cracks in the 
boards, a-puffing away like a nest of young locomotives ? 
And this here more august and upper-crust cockloft is the 
ConscrumptTve Hospital. First you begins to cough, then 
you proceed to expectorate — spittoons, as you see, perwidgd 
free gracious for nothing — fined a kivarten if you spits on the 
floor. 

Then your cheeks they grows red, and your nose it grows thin, 

And your bones they sticks out, till they comes through your skin . 

and then, when you’ve sufficiently covered the poor dear 
shivering bare backs of the hairystocracy, 

^ie, die, die. 

Away you fly. 

Your soul is in the sky ! 

as the hinspired Shakspeare wittily remarks.^" 

And the ribald lay down on his back^ stretched himself out 
and pretended to die in a fit of coughing, which last was 
alas ! no counterfeit, while poor I, shocked and bewildered, let 
my tears falls, fast upon my knees. 

“ Fine him a pot !” roared one, “ for talking about kicking 
the bucket. He’s a nice young man to keep a cove’s spirits 
up, and talk about ‘ a short life and a merry one.’ Here 
comes the heavy. Hand it here to take the taste of that fel 
low’s talk out of my mouth.” • \ 

“Well, my young ’un,” re-commenced my tormentor, “ and 
how do you like your company]” 

“Leave the boy alone,” growled Crossthwaite ; “don’t 
you see he’s crying ?” 

“Is that any thing good to eat ? Give me some on it if 
it is — it’ll save me washing my face.” And he took hold of 
my hair and pulled my head back. 

“ I’ll tell you what. Jemmy Downes,” said Crossthwaite, 
in a voice which made him draw back, “if you don’t drop 
that. I’ll give you such a taste of my tongue* as shall turn 
you blue.” 

You’d better try it on then. Do — only just now — if you 
please.” 

“ Be quiet, you fool !” said another. “ You’re a pretty fel 


ALTON LOCKK, TAILOR AND POET 


27 


low to chaff the orator. He’ll slang you up the chimney 
afore you can get your shoes on.” 

“ Fine him a kivarten for quarreling,” cried another ; and 
the bully subsided into a minute’s silence, after a sotto voce — 
“ Blow temperance, and blow all Chartists, say I !” and then 
delivered himself of his feelings in a doggrel song : 

Some folks leads coves a dance. 

With their pledge of temperance, 

And their plans for donkey sociation ; 

And their pocket-fulls they crams 
By their patriotic flams, 

And then swears ’tis for the good of the nation. 

But I don’t care two inions 
For political opinions, 

While I can stand my heavy and my quartern j 
For to drown dull care within, 

In baccy, beer, and gin. 

Is the prime of a working-tailor’s fortin ! 

“ There’s common sense for yer now ; hand the pot here.” 

I recollect nothing more of that day, except that I bent 
myself to my work with assiduity enough to earn praises 
from Crossthwaite. It was to be done, and I did it. The 
only virtue I ever possessed (if virtue it he) is the power of 
absorbing my whole heart and mind in the pursuit of the 
moment, however dull or trivial, if there be good reason why 
it should he pursued at all. 

I owe, too, an apology to my readers for introducing all 
this ribaldry. God knows it is as little to my taste as it can 
be to theirs, but the thing exists ; and those who live, if not 
by, yet still beside such a state of things, ought to know what 
the men are like, to whose labor, ay, life-blood, they owe their 
luxuries. They are “their brothers’ keepers,” let them deny 
it as they will. Thank God, many are finding that out ; 
and the morals of the working-tailors, as well as of other 
classes of artisans, are rapidly improving : a change which 
has been brought about partly by the wisdom and kindness 
of a few master-tailors, who have built workshops fit for 
human beinga and have resolutely stood out against the 
iniquitous and destructive alterations in the system of employ- 
ment. Among them I may, and will, whether they like it 
or not, make honorable mention of Mr. Willis, of St. James’s- 
Atreet, and Mr. Stultz, of Bond-street. 

But nine-tenths of the improvement has been owing, not to 
the masters, but to the men themselves; and who among 


28 


ALTON LOCKb’, TAILOR AND TOET. 


them, my aristocratic readers, do you think, have been the 
great preachers and practicers of temperance, thrift, chastity, 
self-respect, and education ? Who shriek not in your Bel- 
gravian saloons — the Chartists ; the communist Chartists ; 
upon whom you and your venal press heap every kind of 
cowardly execration and ribald slander. You have found out 
many things, since Peterloo ; add that fact to thv aumber. 

It may seem strange that I did not tell my n tther into 
what a pandemonium I had fallen, and get her m deliver 
me; but a delicacy, which was not all evil kept me back. I 
shrank from seeming to dislike to earn my daily bread ; and 
still more from seeming to object to what she had appointed 
for me. Her will had been always law; it seemed a deadly 
sin to dispute it. I took for granted, too, that she knew what 
the place was like, and that, therefore, it must be right for 
me. And when I came home at night, and got back to ray 
beloved missionary stories, I gathered materials enough to 
occupy my thoughts during the next day’s work, and make 
me blind and deaf to all the evil around me. My mother, 
poor dear creature, would have denounced my day-dreams 
sternly enough, had she known of their existence : but were 
they not holy angels from heaven? guardians sent by that 
Father, whom I had been taught 7iot to believe in, to shield 
my senses from pollution ? 

I was ashamed, too, to mention to my mother the wicked- 
ness which I saw and heard. With the delicacy of an inno- 
cent boy, I almost imputed the very witnessing of it as a sin 
to myself; and soon I began to be ashamed of more than the 
mere sitting by and hearing. I found myself gradually learn- 
ing slang insolence, laughing at coarse jokes, taking part in 
angry conversations ; my moral tone was gradually becoming 
lower ; but yet the habit of prayer remained, and every night 
at my bedside, when I prayed to “be converted, and made a 
child of God,” I prayed that the same mercy might be ex- 
tended to my fellow- workmen, “if they belonged to the num- 
ber ol'-'hj elect.” Those prayers may have been answered in 
a wiuer and deeper sense than I then thought of. 

But, altogether, I felt myself in a most distracted, rudderless 
state. My mother’s advice I felt daily less and less inclined 
to ask. A gulf was opening between us : we were moving 
in two different worlds, and she saw it, and imputed it to me 
as a sin ; and was the more cold to me by day, and prayed for 
mo (as I knew afterward) the more passionately while I 
slept. But help or teacher I had none. I knew not that 


ALTON LOCKE. TATLOR AND POET. 

1 had a Father in Heaven. How could he be my Father till 
I was converted ? I was a child of the Devil they told me ; 
and now and then I felt inclined to take them at their word, 
and behave like one. No synjpathizing face looked on me 
out of the wide heaven — off the wide earth, none I was all 
boiling with new hopes, new temptations, new passions, new 
sorrows, and “ I looked to the right hand and to the left, and 
no man cared for my soul.” 

? had felt myself from the first strangely drawn toward 
Crossthwaite, carefully as lie seemed to avoid me, except to 
give me business directions in the work-room. He alone had 
shown me any kindness ; and he, too, alone was untainted 
with the sin around him. Silent, moody, and pre-occupied, 
he was yet the king of the room. His opinion was always 
asked, and listened to. His eye always cowed the ribald and 
the blasphemer; his songs, when he rarely broke out into 
merriment, were always rapturously applauded. Men hated, 
and yet respected him. I shrank from him at first, when I 
heard him called a Chartist ; for my dim notions of that class 
were, that they were a very wicked set of people, who want- 
ed to kill all the soldiers and policemen, and respectable peo- 
^ pie, and rob all the shops of their contents. But Chartist or 
none, Crossthwaite fascinated me. I often found myself neg- 
lecting my work to study his face. I liked him, too, because 
he was as I was — small, pale, and weakly. He might have 
been five-and-twenty ; but his looks, like those of too many a 
working-man, were rather those of a man of forty. Wild 
gray eyes gleamed out from under huge knitted brows, and 
a perpendicular wall of brain, too large for his puny body. 
He was not only, I soon discovered, a water-drinker, but a 
strict vegetarian also; to which, perhaps, he owed a great 
deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility and sens- 
itiveness of his mind. But whether from his ascetic habits, 
or the unhealthiness of his trade, the marks of ill-health were 
upon him; and his sallow cheek, and ever-working lip, pro- 
claimed too surely — 

The fiery soul which, working out its way, 

Fretted the pigmy body to decay; 

And o’er informed the tenement of clay. 

I longed to open my heart to him. In.stinctively I felt 
that he was a kindred spirit. Often, turning round suddenly 
in the work-room, I caught him watching me v/iih an ex- 
pression which seemed to say, “ Poor boy, and art thou too 


80 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


one of us? Hast thou too to fight with poverty and guide- 
lessness, and the cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, as I have 
done I” But when I tried to speak to him earnestly, hvs 
manner was peremptory and repellent. It was well for me 
that so it was — well for me I see now, that it w-as not from 
him my mind received the first lessons in self-development. 
For guides did come to me in good time, though not such, 
perhaps, as either my mother or my readers w'ould have chosor 
for me. • 

My great desire now Avas to get knowledge. By getting 
that I fancied, as most self-educated men are apt to do, I 
should surely get wisdom. Books, I thought would tell me 
all I needed. But where to get the books? And which? I 
had exhausted our small stock at home ; I was sick and tired, 
without knowing why, of their narrow, conventional view of 
every thing. After all, I had been reading them all along 
not lor their doctrines but for their facts, and knew not where 
to find more except in forbidden paths. I dare not ask my 
mother for books, for I dare not confess to her that religious 
ones were just what I did not want; and all history, poetry, 
science, I had been accustomed to hear spoken of as “carnal 
learning, human philosophy,” more or less diabolic and ruin- 
ous to the soul. So, as usually happens in this life, “ by the 
law was the knowledge of sin,” and unnatural restrictions on 
the development of the human spirit only associated with 
guilt of conscience, what ought to have been an innocent and 
necessary blessing. 

My poor mother, not singular in her mistake, had sent me 
forth, out of an unconscious paradise into the evil world, with- 
out allowing me even the sad strength which comes from eat- 
ing of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ; she expected in 
mo the innocence of the dove, as if that was possible on such 
an earth as this, without the wisdom of the serpent to sup- 
port it. She forbade me strictly to stop and look into the 
windows of print shops, and I strictly obeyed her. But she 
forbade me, too, to read any book which I had not first shown 
her ; and that restriction, reasonable enough in the abstract, 
practically meant, in the case of a poor boy like myself, read- 
ing no books at all. And then came my first act of disobedi- 
ence, the parent of many more. Bitterly have I repented it, 
and bitterly been punished. Yet, strange contradiction I I 
dare not wish it undone. But such is the great law of life. 
Punished for our sins we surely are ; and yet how often they 
become our blessings, teaching us that which nothing else can 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


31 


teach us ! Nothing else ? One says so. Rich parents, I 
suppose, say so, when they send their sons to public schools 
“ to learn life.” We working-men have too often no other 
teacher than our own errors But surely, surely, the rich 
ought to have been able to discover some mode of education 
in which knowledge may be acquired without the price of 
conscience. Yet they have not ; and we must not complain 
of them for not giving such a one to the working-man, when 
they have not yet even given it to their own children. 

In a street through which I used to walk homeward was 
an old book shop, piled and fringed outside and in with books 
of every age, size, and color. And here I at last summoned 
courage to stop, and timidly and stealthily taking out some 
volume whose title attracted me, snatch hastily a few pages 
and hasten on, half fearful of being called on to purchase, half 
ashamed of a desire which I fancied every one else consider- 
ed as unlawful as my mother did. Sometimes I was lucky 
enough to find the same volume several days running, and to 
take up the subject where I had left it off; and thus I con- 
trived to hurry through a great deal of “ Childe Harold,” 
“ Lara,” and the “ Corsair” — a new world of wonders to me. 
They fed, those poems, both my health and my diseases ; while 
they gave me, little of them as I could understand, a thou- 
sand new notions about scenery and man, a sense of poetic 
melody and luxuriance as yet utterly unknown. They chimed 
in with all my discontent, my melancholy, my thirst after any 
life of action and excitement, however frivolous, insane, el- 
even worse. I forgot the Corsair’s sinful trade in his free and 
daring life ; rather, I honestly eliminated the bad element — 
in which, God knows, I took no delight — and kept the good 
one. However that might be, the innocent, guilty pleasure 
grew on me day by day. Innocent because human — guilty, 
because disobedient. But have I not paid the penalty ? 

One evening, however, I fell accidentally on a new book — 
“ The Life and Poems of J. Bethune.” I opened the story 
Df his life — became interested, absorbed — and there I stood, 
I know not how long, on the greasy pavement, heedless of the 
passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the flaring 
gas-light that sad history of labor, sorrow, and death. How 
the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation it- 
self, and the daily struggle to earn his bread by digging and 
ditching, educated himself — how he toiled unceasingly with 
his hands — how he wrote his poems in secret on dirty scraps 
of paper and old leaves of books — how thus he wore himself 


32 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 

out, manful and godly, “ bating not a jot of heart or 
till the weak flesh would bear no more ; and the noble spirit, 
unrecognized by the lord of the soil, returned to God who gave 
it. I seemed to see in his history a sad presage of my own. 
If he, stronger, more self-restrained, more righteous far than 
ever I could be, had died thus unknown, unassisted, in the 
stern battle with social disadvantages, what must be my lot ? 

And tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear, fell fast 
upon the book. 

A harsh voice from the inner darkness of the shop startled 
me. 

“ Jloot, laddie, ye’ll better no spoil my books wi’ greeting 
jwer them.” * 

I replaced the book hastily, and was hunting on, but the 
same voice called me back in a more kindly tone. 

“ Stop a wee, my laddie. I’m no angered wi’ ye. Come 
in, and we’ll just ha’ a bit crack thegither.” 

I went in, for there was a geniality in the tone, to which I 
was unaccustomed, and something whispered to me the hope 
of an adventure, as indeed it proved to be, if an event deserves 
that name which decided the course of my whole destiny. 

“ What war ye greeting about, then ? What was the 
book 

“ ‘ Bethune’s Life and Poems,’ sir,” I said. “And cer- 
tainly they did affect me very much.” 

“Affect ye? Ah, Johnnie Bethune, puir fellow! Ye 
maunna take on about sic like laddies, or ye’ll greet your e’en 
out o’ your head. It’s mony a braw man beside Johnnie 
Bethune has gane Johnnie Bethune’s gate.” 

Though unaccustomed to the Scotch accent, I could make 
out enough of this speech to be in nowise consoled by it. But 
the old man turned the conversation by asking me abruptly 
my name, and trade, and family. 

“ Hum, hum, widow, eh ? puir body ! work at Smith’s 
shop, eh ? Ye’ll ken John Crossthwaite, then ? ay ? hum 
hum ; an’ ye’re desirous o’ reading books, vara weel — let’s 
see your eawpabilities.” 

And he pulled me into the dim light of the little back win- 
dow, shoved back his spectacles, and peering at me from un- 
derneath^ them, began, to my great astonishment, to feel my 
head all over. 

“ Hum, hum, a vara gude forehead — vara good indeed. 
Causative organs large, perceptive, ditto. Imagination super- 
abundant — mun be heeded. Benevolence, conscientiousness, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


3b 


ditto, ditto. Caution — no — that — large — might be devel- 
oped,” with a quiet chuckle, “ under a gude Scot’s education. 
Just turn your head into profile, laddie. Hum, hum. Back 
o’ the head a’thegither defective. Firmness sma’ — love of 
approbatjen unco big. Beware o’ leeing, as ye live ; ye’ll 
need it. Philoprogenitiveness gude. Ye’D be fond o’ bairns, 
T’m guessing ?” ~ 

“ Of what? ” 

“Children, laddie — children.” 

“ Very,” answered I, in utter dismay, at what seemed to 
me a magical process for getting at all my secret failings. 

“ Hum, hum ! Amative and combative organs sma’ — a 
general want o’ healthy animalism, as my freen’ Mr. Deville 
wad say. And ye want to read books ? 

. “ Vara weel ; then books I’ll lend ye, after I’ve had a 

crack wi’ Crossthwaite aboot ye, gin I find his opinion o’ ye 
satisfactory. Come to me the day after to-morrow. An’ 
mind, here are my rules: a’ damage done to a book to be 
paid for, or na mair books lent ; ye’ll mind to take no books 
without leave ; specially ye’ll mind no to read in bed o’ 
nights — industrious folks ought to be sleepin’ betimes, an’ I’d 
no be a party to burning puir weans in their beds ; and 
lastly, ye’ll observe not to read mair than five books at 
once.” 

I asaured him that I thought such a thing impossible ; but 
he smiled in his saturnine way, and said, 

“ We’ll see this day fortnight. Now, then, I’ve observed 
ye for a month past over that aristocrat Byron’s poems. And 
I’m willing to teach the young idea how to shoot — but no to 
shoot itself; so ye’ll just leave alane that vinegary, soul- 
destroying trash, and I’ll lend ye, gin I hear a gude report of 
ye, ‘ The Paradise Lost,’ o’ John Milton — a gran’ classic 
model ; and for the doctrine o’t, it’s just aboot as gude as 
ye’ll hear elsewhere the noo. So gang your gate, and tell 
John Crossthwaite, privately, auld Sandy Mackaye wad like 
to see him the morn’s night.” ' 

I went home in wonder and delight. Books ! books ! books ! 
I should have my fill of them at last. And when -I said my 
prayers at night, I thanked God for this unexpected boon ; 
and then remembered that my mother had forbidden it. 
That thought checked the thanks, but not the pleasure. Oh, 
parents ! are there not real sins enough in the world already, 
without your defiling it, over and above, by inventing new 
ones ? 


CHAPTER III. 


SANDY MACKAYE. 

That day fortnight came — and the old Scotchman’s words 
came true. Four books of his I had already, and I came in 
to borrow a fifth ; whereon he began Avith a solemn chuckle : 

“ Eh, laddie, laddie, I’ve been treating ye as the grocers do 
their new prentices. They first gie the boys three days’ free 
warren among the figs and the sugar-candy, and they get 
scunnered wi’ sweets after that. Noo, then, my lad ye’ve 
just been reading four books in three days — and here’s a fifth. 
Ye’ll no open this again.” 

“ Oh !” I cried, piteously enough, “just let me finish what 
I am reading. I’m in the middle of such a wonderful account 
of the Hornitos of Jorullo.” 

“ Hornets or wasps, a' swarm o’ them ye’re like to have at 
this rate ; and a very bad substitute ye’ll find them for the 
Attic bee. Now tak tent. I’m no in the habit of speaking 
without deliberation, for it saves a man a great deal of trouble 
in changing his mind. If ye canna traduce to me a page o’ 
Virgil by this day three months, ye read no more o’ my books. 
Desultory reading is the bane o’ lads. Ye maun begin with 
self-restraint and method, my man, gin ye intend to gie your- 
sel’ a liberal education. So I’ll just mak’ you a present of an 
auld Latin grammar, and ye maun begin where your betters 
ha’ begun before you.” 

“But who will teach me Latin'?” 

“ Hoot I man ! who’ll teach a man any thing except him- 
sel’ ? It’s only gentle folks and puir aristocrat bodies that go 
to be spoilt wi’ tutors and pedagogues, cramming and loading 
them wi’ knowledge, as ye’d load a gun, to shoot it all out 
again, just as it went down, in a college examination, and 
forget all aboot it after.” 

“ Ah !” I sighed, “ if I could have gone to college !” 

“ What for, then ] My father was a Hieland farmer, and 
yet he was a weel learned man ; and ‘ Sandy, my lad,’ he 
used to say, ‘ a man kens just as much as he’s taught himsel’, 
and na mair. So get wisdom ; and wi’ all your getting, get 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


35 


understanding.’ And so I did. And mony’s the Greek ex- 
ercise I’ve written in the cowbyres. And mony’s the page 
o’ Virgil, too, I’ve turned into good Dawric Scotch to ane 
that’s dead and gane, puir hizzie, sitting under the same plaid, 
with the sheep feeding round us, up among the hills, looking 
out ower the broad blue sea, and the wee haven wi’ the fish- 
ing cobles — ” 

There was a long solemn pause. I can not tell why, but 
I loved the man from that moment ; and I thought, too, 
that he began to love me. Those few words- seemed a proof 
of confidence, perhaps all the deeper, because accidental and 
unconscious. 

I took the Virgil which he lent me, with Hamilton’s literal 
translation between the lines, and an old tattered Latin 
grammar ; I felt myself quite a learned man: — actually the 
possessor of a Latin book ! I regarded as something almost 
miraculous the opening of this new field for my ambition. 
Not that I was consciously, much less selfishly, ambitious 
I had no idea as yet to be any thing but a tailor to the end ; 
to make clothes — perhaps in a less infernal atmosphere — but 
still to make clothes and live thereby. I did not suspect that 
I possessed powers above the mass. My intense longing after 
knowledge had been to me like a girl’s first love — a thing to 
be concealed from every eye — to be looked at askance, even 
by myself, delicious as it was, with holy shame and trembling. 
And thus it was not cowardice merely, but natural modesty, 
which put me on a hundred plans of concealing my studies 
from my mother, and even from my sister. 

I .slept in a little lean-to garret at the back of the house, 
some ten feet long by six Made. I could just stand upright 
against the inner wall, while the roof on the other side ran 
down to the floor. There was no fireplace in it, or any 
means of ventilation. No wonder I coughed all night ac- 
cordingly, and woke about two every morning with choking 
throat and aching head. My mother often said that the 
room was “too small for a Christian to sleep in, but where 
could she get a better ?” 

Such was my only study. I could not use it as such, how- 
ever, at night without discovery ; for my mother carefully 
looked in every evening to see-that my candle wns out. But 
when my kind cough woke me, I rose, and creeping like a 
mouse about the room — for my mother and sister slept in the 
next chamber, and eveiy sound was audible through the 
narroM' partition — I drew my darling books out from under a 


ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND POET 


.36 

board of the floor, one end of which I had gradually loosenei. 
at odd minutes, and with them a rushlight, earned by running 
on messages, or by taking bits of work home, and finishing 
them for my fellows. 

No wonder that with this scanty rest, and this complicated 
exertion of hands, eyes, and brain, followed by the long 
dreary day’s work of the shop, my health began to fail ; my 
eyes grew weaker and weaker ; my cough became more 
acute ; my appetite failed me daily. My mother noticed the 
change, and questioned me about it, affectionately enough. 
But I durst not, alas ! tell the truth. If was not one offense, 
but the arrears of months of disobedience which I should have 
had to confess ; and so arose infinite false excuses, and petty 
prevarications, which embittered and clogged still more my 
already overtasked spirit. About my own ailments — formid- 
able as I believe they w^ere — I never had a moment’s anxiety. 
The expectation of early death was as unnatural to me as it 
is, I suspect, to almost all. I die ] Had I not hopes, plans, 
desires, infinite ? Could I die while they were unfulfilled ? 
Even now, I do not believe I shall die yet. 1 will not believe 
it — but let that pass. 

Yes, let that pass. Perhaps I have lived long enough — 
longer than* many a gray-headed man. 

There is a race of mortals who become 

Old in their youth, and die ere middle age. 

And might not those days of mine then have counted aa 
months ? those days when, before starting forth to walk two 
miles to the shop at six o’clock in the morning, I sat some 
three or four hours shivering on my bed, putting myself into 
cramped and painful postures, not daring even to cough, lest 
my mother should fancy me unwell, and come in to see me, 
poor dear soul ! my eyes aching over the page, my feet 
wrapped up iti the bedclothes, to keep them from the miser- 
able pain of the cold ; longing, watching, dawn after dawm, 
for the kind summer mornings, when I should need no candle- 
light. Look at the picture awhile, ye comfortable folks, who 
take down from your shelves what books you like best at the 
moment, and then lie back, amid prints and statuettes, to 
grow wise in an easy chair, with a blazing fire and a cam- 
l)hine lamp. The lower classes uneducated ! Perhaps you 
would be so too, if learning cost you the privation which it 
costs some of them. 

But this concealment could not last. My only wonder is. 


ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND TOE! 


37 


that 1 continued to g^et whole months of undiscovered study. 
One morning, about four o’clock, as might have been expect- 
ed, my mother heard me stirring, came in, and found me sit- 
ting cross-legged on my bed, stitching away, indeed, with all 
my migl^, but with a Virgil open before me. 

She glanced at the book, clutched it with one hand and 
ray arm with the other, and sternly asked, 

“Where did you get this heathen stuff’?” 

A lie rose to ray lips ; but I had been so gradually en- 
tangled in the loathed meshes of a system of concealment, 
and consequent prevarication, that I felt as if one direct false- 
hood would ruin for ever ray fast-failing self-respect, and I 
told her the whole truth. She took the book and left the 
room. It was Saturday morning, and I spent two miserable 
days, for she never spoke a word to me till the two ministers 
had made their appearance, and drank their tea on Sunday 
evening ; then at last she opened — 

“ And now, Mr. Wigginton, what account have you of 
I this Mr. Mackaye, who has seduced my unhappy boy from 
the paths of obedience ?” 

“ I am sorry to say, madam,” answered the dark man, with 
a solemn snuffle, “ that he proves to be a most objectionable 
and altogether unregenerate character. He is, as I am in- 
formed, neifTier more nor less than a Chartist and an open 
blasphemer.” 

“He is not!” I interrupted, angrily. “He has told me 
more about God, and given me better advice, than any hu- 
man being, except my mother.” 

“ Ah ! madam, so thinks the unconverted heart, ignorant 
that the god of the Deist is not the God of the Bible — a con- 
suming fire to all but His beloved elect ; the god of the Deist, 
unhappy youth, is a mere self-invented, all-indulgent phan- 
tom — a will-o’-the-wisp, deluding the unwary, as he has 
deluded you, into the slough of carnal reason and shameful 
profligacy.^’ 

“ Do you mean to call me a profligate?” I retorted fierces!y, 
for my blood was up, and I felt I was fighting for all which 
* I prized in the world : “ if you do, you lie. Ask my mother 
when I ever disobeyed her before ? I have never touched a 
drop of any thing stronger than water ; I have slaved over- 
hours to pay for my own candle, I have — I have no sins to 
accuse myself of, and neither you nor any other person know 
of any. Do you call me a profligate because I wish to edu- 
cate myself and rise in life ?” 


38 ' 


. ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“Ah !” groaned my poor mother to herself, “still uncon* 
vinced of sin !” 

“The old Adam, my dear madam, you see — standing, as 
lie always does, on his own filthy rags of works, while all the 
imaginations of his heart are only evil continually. Jjisten to 
me, poor sinner — ” 

“ I will not listen to you,’! I cried, the accumulated disgust 
of years bursting out once and for all, “ for I hate and despise 
you, eating my poor mother here out of house and home. You 
are one of those who creep into widows’ houses, and for pre- 
tense make long prayers. You, sir, I will hear,” I went on, 
turning to the dear old man who had sat by shaking his white 
locks with a sad and puzzled air, “ for I love you.” 

“My dear sister Locke,” he began, “I really think some- 
times — that is, ahem — with your leave, brother — I am almost 
disposed — but I should wish to defer to your superior zeal — 
yet, at the same time, perhaps, the desire for information, 
however carnal in itself, may be an instrument in the Lord’s 
hands — you know what I mean. I always thought him a 
gracious youth, madam, didn’t you ? And perhaps — I only 
observe it in passing — the Lord’s people among the dissenting 
connections are apt td undervalue human learning as a means 
— of course, I mean only as a means. It is not generally 
known, I believe, that our reverend Puritan patriaTchs, Howe, 
and Baxter, Owen and many more, were not altogether un- 
acquainted with heathen authors ; nay, that they may have 
been called absolutely learned men. And some of our leading 
ministers are inclined — no doubt they will be led rightly in so 
important a matter — to follow the example of the Indepen- 
dents in educating their young ministers, and turning Satan’s 
weapons of heathen mythology against himself, as St. Paul 
is said to have done. My dear boy, what books have you now 
got by you of Mr. Mackaye’s ?” 

“ Milton’s Poems and a Latin Virgil.” 

“Ah!” groaned the dark man; “will poetry, will Latin ■ 
save an immortal soul ?” ■ -.-'4 

“I’ll tell you what, sir; you say yourself that it depends* 
on God’s absolute counsel whether I am saved or not. So, if I 
am elect, I shall be saved whatever I do ; and if I am not, I ; 
shall be damned whatever I do ; and in the meantime you i 
had better mind your own business, and let me do the best l| 
can for this life, as the next is all settled for me.” 

This flippant, but after all not unreasonable speech, seemed 
to silence the man ; and I took the opportunity of running up- 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


39 


etairs and bringing down rny Milton. The old man was 
speaking as I re-entered. 

“ And you know, my dear madam, Mr. Milton was a true 
converted man, and a Puritan.” 

“ He was Oliver Cromwelk's secretary,” I added. 

“Did he teach you to disobey your mother]” asked mv 
mother.” 

I did not answer ; and the old man, after turning over a 
few leaves, as if he knew the book well, looked up. 

“I think, madam, you might let the youth keep these booKs, 
if he will promise, as 1 am sure he will, to see no more of 
Mr. Mackaye.” 

I was ready to burst out crying, but I made up my mind 
and answered, 

“ I must see him once again, or he will think me so ungrate- 
ful. He is the best friend that I ever had, except you, mother, 
Besides, I do not know if he will lend me any, after this.” 

My mother looked at the old minister, and then gave a 
sullen assent. “Promise me only to see him once — but I 
can not trust you. You have deceived me once, Alton, and 
you may again !” 

“I shall not, I shall not,” I answered proudly. “ You do 
not know me !” — and I spoke true. 

“You do not know yourself, my poor dear foolish child !” 
she replied — and that was true too. 

“And now, dear friends,” said the dark man, “let us join 
in offering up a few words of special intercession.” 

We all knelt down, and I soon discovered that by the special 
intercession was meant a string of bitter and groundless slan- 
ders against poor me, twisted into the form of a prayer for my 
conversion, “ if it were God’s will.” To which I responded 
with a closing “Amen,” for which I was sorry afterward, 
when I recollected that it was said in merely insolent mockery. 
But the little faith I had was breaking up fast — not alto- 
gether, surely, by my own fault.* 

* The portraits of the minister and the missionary are surely excep- 
tions to their class, rather than the average. The Baptists have had 
their Andrew Fuller and Robert Hall, and among missionaries. Dr. 
Carey, and noble spirits in plenty. But such men as those who excited 
Alton Locke’s disgust are to bo met with in every sect; in the Church 
of England, and in the Church of Rome. And it is a real and fearful 
.scandal to the younrr, to see such men listened to as God’s messengers, 
in spite of their utter want of any manhood or virtue, simply because 
they are “orthodox,” each according to the shibboleths of his hearers, 
and" po.ssess that vulpine “discretion of dullness,” whose miraculous 


40 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


At all events, from that day I was emancipated from modern 
Puritanism. The ministers both avoided all serious convers- 
ation with me ; and my mother did the same ; while with 
a strength of mind, rare among women, she never alluded to 
the scene of that Sunday evening. It was a rule with her 
never to recur to what was once done and settled. What was 
to be, might he prayed over. But it was to he endured in 
silence ; yet wider and wider ever from that time opened the 
gulf between us. 

I went trembling the next afternoon to Mackaye, and told 
my story. He first scolded me sev’-erely for disobeying my 
mother. “ He that begins o’ that gate, laddie, ends by dis- 
obeying God and his ain conscience. Gin ye’re to be a scholar, 
God will make you one — and if not, ye’ll no mak’ yoursel’ ane 
in spite o’ Him and His commandments.” And then he 
filled his pipe and chuckled av/ay in silence ; at last, he ex- 
ploded in a horse-laugh. 

“ So ye gied the ministers a bit o’ yer mind ? ‘ The deil’s 

amang the tailors’ in gude earnest, as the sang says. There’s 
Johnnie Crossthwaite kicked the Papist priest out o’ his house 
yestreen ; puir ministers, it’s ill times wi’ them ! They gang 
about keckling and screighing after the working-men, like a 
hen that’s hatched ducklings, when she sees them tak’ the 
water. Little Dunkeld’s coming to London sune, I’m think- 
ing. 

Hech ! sic a parish, a parish, a parish ; 

Hech ! sic a parish as little Dunkeld, 

They hae stickit the minister, hanged the precentor. 

Dung down the steeple, and drucken the bell.” 

“ But may I keep the books a litrtle while, Mr. Mackaye ! ” 

“ Keep them till ye die, gin ye will. What is the worth 
o’ them to me ] What is the worth o’ any thing to me, puir 
auld deevil, that ha’ no half-a-dizen years to live, at the 
furthest. God bless ye, my bairn ; gang hame, and mind 
your mither, or iPs little gude books ’ll do ye.” 

might Dean Swift sets forth in his “ Essay on the Fates of Clergymen.” 
Such men do exist, and prosper ; and as long as they are allowed to do 
so Alton Locke.s will meet them, and be scandalized by them. — E d. 


CHAPTER IV. 

TAILORS AND SOLDIERS. 

I vi’AS now thrown attain utterly on my own resource^ 1 
read and re-read Milton’s “ Poems” and Virgil’s “ A^neid” foi 
six more months at every spare moment ; thus spending over 
them, I suppose, all in all, far more time than most gentle- 
men have done. I found, too, in the last volume of Milton a 
few of his select prose works : the “ Areopagitica,” the “ Defense 
of the English People,” and one or two more, in which I 
gradually began to take an interest ; and, little of them as I 
could comprehend, I was awed by their tremendous depth 
and power, as well as excited by the utterly new trains of 
thought into which they led me. Terrible was the amount 
of bodily fatigue which I had to undergo in reading at every 
spare moment, while walking to and fro from my work, while 
sitting up, often from midnight till dawn, stitching away to 
pay for the tallow-candle which I burnt, till I had to resort 
to all sorts of uncomfortable contrivances for keeping myself 
awake even at the expense of bodily pain — Heaven forbid that 
I should weary my readers by describing them ! Young men 
of the upper classes, to whom study — pursue it as intensely 
as you will — is but the business of the day, and every spare 
moment relaxation-; little you guCss the frightful drudgery 
undergone by a man of the people who has vowed to educate 
himself — to live at once two lives, each as severe as the 
whole of yours — to bring to the self-imposed toil of intellectual 
improvement, a body and brain already worn out by a day of 
toilsome manual labor. I did it. God forbid, though, that 
I should take, credit to myself for it. Hundreds more have 
done it, with still fewer advantages than mine. Hundreds 
more, an ever increasing army of martyrs, are doing it at 
this moment : of some of them too, perhaps you may hear 
hereafter. 

I had read through Milton, as I said, again and again ; I 
had got out of him all that my youth and my unregulated 
mind enabled me to get. I had devoured, too, not without 
profit, a large old edition of “Fox’s Marty r.s,” which the 


42 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


venerable minister lent me, and now I was hungering again 
for fresh food, and again at a loss where to find it. 

I was hungering, too, for more than information — for a 
friend. Since my intercourse with Sandy Mackaye had been 
stopped, six months had passed without my once opening my 
lips to any human being upon the subjects with which my 
mind was haunted day and night, I wanted to know more 
about poetry, history, politics, philoa 'phy — all things in heaven 
and earth. But, above all, I wawted a faithful and sym- 
pathizing ear into which to pour ah my doubts, discontents, 
and aspirations. - My sister Susan, wao was one year younger 
than myself, was growing into a slerder, pretty, hectic girl 
of sixteen. But she was altogether a devout Puritan. She 
had^'ust gone through the process of conviction of sin and 
conversion ; and being looked upon at the chapel as an 
especially gracious professor, was either unable or unwilling 
to think or speak on any subject, except on those to which I 
felt a growing distaste. She had shrunk from me, too, very 
much, since my ferocious attack that Sunday evening on 
the dark minister, who was her special favorite. I remarked 
it, and it was a fresh cause of unhappiness and perplexity. 

At last 1 made up my mind, come what would, to force 
myself upon Crossthwaite. He was the only man whom 1 
knew who seemed able to help me ; and his very reserve had 
invested him with a mystery, which served to heighten my 
imagination of his powers. I waylaid him one day coming 
out of the work-room to go home, and plunged at once despe- 
rately into the niatter. 

“ Mr. Crossthwaite, I want to speak to you. I want to 
ask you to advise me.’’ 

“ I have known that a long time.” 

“ Then why did you never say a kind word to me ]” 

“ Because I was waiting to see whether you were worth 
saying a kind word to. It was but the other day, remember, 
you were a bit of a boy. Now, I think, I may trust yo,! with 
a thing or two. Besides, I wanted to see whether you trusted 
me enough to ask me. Now you’ve broke the ice at last, in 
with you, head and ears, and see what you can fish out.” 

“ I am very unhappy — ” 

“ That’s no new disorder that I know of.” 

“ No ; but I think the reason I am unhappy is a strange 
one ; at least, I never read of but one person else in the same 
way. I want to educate myself, and I can’t.” 

“ You must have read precious little then, if you think 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. t3 

yourself in a strange way. Bless the boy’s heart ! And 
what the dickens do you want to be educating yourself for, 
pray 1” 

This was said in a tone of good-humored banter, which 
gave me courage. He offered to walk homeward with me ; 
and, as I sliambled along by his side, I told him all my story 
and all my griefs. 

I uc'^’er shall forget that walk. Every house, tree, turning, 
which we passed that day on our way, is indissolubly, con- 
nected in my mind with some strange new thought which 
arose in me just at each spot ; and recurs, so are the mind 
and the senses connected, as surely as I repass it. 

I had been telling him about Sandy Mackaye. Ho con- 
fessed to an acquaintance with him : but in a reserved and 
mysterious way, which only heightened my curiosity. 

We were going through the Horse Guards, and I could not 
help lingering to look with wistful admiration on the huge 
mustached war-machines who sauntered about the court-yard. 

A tall and handsome officer, blazing in scarlet and gold, 
cantered in on a superb horse, and, dismounting, threw the 
reins to a dragoon as grand and gaudy as himself. Did I 
envy him ] MTll — I was but seventeen. And there is 
something noble to the mind, as well as to the eye, in the 
great, strong man, who can fight — a completeness, a self- 
restraint, a terrible sleeping power in him. As Mr. Carlyle 
says, “ A soldier, after all, is one of the few remaining reali- 
ties of the age. All other professions almost, promise one 
thing, and perform — alas ! what ? But this man promises to 
fight, and does it ; and, if he be told, will veritably take out 
a long sword and kill me.” 

So thought my companion, though the mood in which he 
viewed the fact was somewhat different from my own. 

“ Come on,” he said, peevishly clutching me by the arm ; 
“what do you want dawdling? Are you a nursery-maid, 
that you must stare at those red-coated butchers ? ’ And a 
deep curse followed. 

“ What harm have they done you ?” 

“ I should think I owed them turn enough.” 

“What?” 

“ They cut my father down at Sheffield — perhaps with the 
very swords he helped to make — because he would not sit 
still and starve, and see us starving round him, while those 
who fattened on the sweat of his brow, and on those lungs of 
his, which the sword-grinding dust was easing out day by 


44 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


day, M'ere wantoning on venison and champagne. That’s the 
harm they’ve done me, my chap !” 

“ Poor fellows ! — they only did as they were ordered, I 
suppose.” 

“ And what business have they to let themselves he order- 
ed ? What right, I say — what right has any free, reason- 
able soul on earth, to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder 
any man, right or wrong — even his own brother or his own 
father — just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes 
as that officer, without learning, without any god except liis 
own looking-glass and his opera-dancer — a fellow who, just 
because he is born a gentleman, is set to command gray-head- 
ed men before he can command his own meanest passions. 
Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be intrusted 
to such a stufl'ed cockatoo ; and that free men should be such 
traitors to their country, traitors to their own flesh and blood, 
as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and tlie smirks of 
the nursery-maids, to do that fellow’s bidding !” 

“What are you a-grumbling about here, my man? — gotten 
the cholera ?” asked one of the dragoons, a huge, stupid-look- 
ing lad. 

“About you, you young long legged cut-throat,” answered 
Crossthwaite, “ and all your crew of traitors.” 

“ Help, help, coomrades o’ mine !” quoth the dragoon, burst- 
ing with laughter; “I’m gane be moorthered wi’ a little booy 
that’s gane mad, and toorned Chartist.” 

I dragged Crossthwaite offi; for what was jest to the sol 
dicrs I saw, by his face, was fierce enough earnest to him. 
We walked on a little in silence. 

“ Now,” I said, “ that was a good-natured fellow enough, 
though he was a soldier. You and he might have cracked 
many a joke together, if you did but understand each other ; 
and he was a countryman of yours, too.” 

“ I may crack something else besides jokes with him some 
day,”* answered he, moodily. 

“ ’Pon my word, you must take care how you do it. He 
is as big as four of us.” 

“That vile aristocrat, the old Italian poet — what’s his 
name ? — Ariosto — ay ! — he knew which quarter the wind 
was making for, when he said that fire-arms would be the 
end of all your old knights and gentlemen in armor, that 
hewed down unarmed innocents as if they had been sheep. 
Gunpowder is your true leveler — dash physical strength ! 
boy’s a man with a musket in his hanc^ my chap !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


45 


God Ibrbid, I said, “ that I should ever be made a man 
ol in that way, or you either. I do not think we are quite 
big enough to make fighters ; and if we were, what have wo 
got to fight about ?” 

“ Big enough to make fighters ?” said he, half to himself; 
“ or strong enough perhaps ? — or clever enough ? — and yet 
Alexander was a little man, and the Petit Caporal, and 
Nelson, and Caesar, too; and so was Saul of Tarsus, and 
weakly he was into the bargain, .disop was a dwarf, and so 
was Attila ; Shakespeare was lame ; Alfred a rickety weak- 
ling; Byron, clubfooted; — so much for body versus spirit — 
brute force versus genius — genius.” • 

I looked at him ; his eyes glared like two balls of fire. 
Suddenly he turned to me. 

‘•Locke, my boy, I’ve made an asri of myself, and got into 
a. rage, and broken a good old resolution of mine, and a prom- 
ise that I fhade to my dear little woman — bless her! — and 
said things to you that you ought to know nothing of for this 
long time ; but those red-coats always put me beside myself. 
God forgive me !” And he held out his hand to me cor- 
dially. 

“ I can quite understand your feeling deeply on one point,” 
I said, as I took it, “ after the sad story you told me ; but 
why so bitter on all ] What is there so very wrong about 
things, that we must begin fighting about it?” 

“ Bless your heart, poor innocent ! What is wrong — what 
is not wrong ? Wasn’t there enough in that talk with 
Mackaye, that you told me of just now, to show any body 
that, who can tell a hawk from a handsaw ?” 

“Was it wrong in him to give himself such trouble about 
the education of a poor young fellow, who has no tie on him. 
who can never repay him ?” 

“ No ; that’s just like him. He feels for the people, for he 
has been one of us. He worked in a printing-office himself 
many a year, and he knows the heart of the working man. 
But he didn’t tell you the whole truth about education. He 
daren’t tell you. No one who has money dare speak out his 
heart ; not that he has much, certainly ; but, the cunning old 
Scot that he is, he lives by the present system of things, and 
he M^on’t speak ill of the bridge which carries him over — till 
the time comes.” 

I could not understand whither all this tended, and walked 
on, silent and somewhat angry, at hearing the least slight 
cast bn Mackaye. 


4(J ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

‘'Don’t you see, stupid?” he broke out at last. “ What 
did he say to you about gentlemen being crammed by tutors 
and professors? Have not you as good a right to them as 
any gentleman ?” 

“ But he told me they were no use — that every man must 
educate himself.” 

“ Oh ! all very fine to tell you the grapes are sour, when 
)'ou can’t reach them. Bah, lad ! Can’t you see what comes 
of education ? that any dolt, provided he be a gentleman, can 
be doctored up at school and college, enough to make him 
play his part decently — his mighty part of ruling us, and riding 
over our heads, and picking our pockets, as parson, dqctor, 
lawyer, member of parliament — while we — you now, for in- 
stance — cleverer than ninety-nine gentlemen out of a hundred, 
if you had Diie-tenth the trouble taken with you that is taken 
with every pig-headed son of an aristocrat — ” 

“ Am I clever ?” asked I, in honest surprise. 

“ What ! haven’t you found that out yet ? Don’t try to 
put that on me. Don’t a girl know when she’s pretty, with- 
out asking her neighbors ?” 

“ Really^ I never thought about it.” 

“More simpleton you. Old Mackaye has, at all events; 
though, canny Scotchman that he is, he’ll never say a word to 
you about it, yet he makes no secret of it to other people. I 
heard him the other day telling some of our friends that you 
were a thorough young genius.” 

I blushed scarlet, between pleasure and a new feeling; 
was it ambition ? 

“Why, haven’t you a right to aspire to a college education 
as any do-nothing canon there at the abbey, lad ?” 

“ I don’t know that I have a right to any thing.” 

“ What, not become what Nature intended you to become ? 
What has she given you brains for, but to be educated and 
used ? Oh ! I heard a fine lecture upon that at our club the 
other night. There was a man there — a gentleman, too, but 
a thorough-going people’s man, T can tell you, Mr. O’Flynn. 
What an orator that man is, to be sure ! The Irish ^schmes, 
I hear they call him in Conciliation Hall. Isn’t he the man 
to pitch into the Mammonites ? ‘ Gentlemen and ladies,’ 

.-••ays he, ‘ how long will a diabolic society’ — no, an effete so- 
ciety it was — ‘ how long will an effete, emasculate, and effem 
inate society, in the diabolic selfishness of its eclecticism, re 
fuse to acknowledge what my immortal countryman, Burke, 
colls the “ Dei voluntatem in rebus revelatarn” — the revela 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


•17 


i.on of Nature’s will in the phenomena of matter ? the cere- 
bration of each in the prophetic sacrament of the yet unde- 
veloped possibilities of his mentation I The form of the brain 
alone, and not the possession of the vile gauds of wealth and 
rank, constitute man’s only right to education — to the glories 
of art and science. Those beaming eye? and roseate lips he- 
neatli me proclaim a bevy of undeveloped Aspasias, of embryo 
Cleopatras, destined by Nature, and only restrained by man’s 
injustice, from ruling the world by their beauty’s eloquence. 
Those massive and beetling brows, gleaming with the lambent 
dames of patriotic ardor — what is needed to unfold them into 
a race of Shakspeares and of Gracchi, ready to proclaim with 
sword and lyre the divine harmonies of liberty, equality, and 
fraternity, before a quailing universe ” 

“ It sounds very grand,” replied I, meekly ; “ and I should 
like very much certainly to have a good education. But I 
can’t see whose injustice keeps me out of one, if I can’t afford 
to pay for it.” 

“ Whose 'I Why, the parsolis’ to be sure. They’ve got the 
monopoly of education in England, and they get their bread 
by it at their public schools and universities ; and of course 
it’s their interest to keep up the price of their commodity, and 
let no man have a taste of it who can’t pay down handsomely. 
And so those aristocrats of college dons go on rolling in riches, 
and fellowships, and scholarships, that were bequeathed by 
the people’s friends in old times, just to educate poor scholars 
like you and me, and give us our rights as free men.” 

“ But I thought the clergy were doing so much to educate 
the poor. At least, I hear all the dissenting ministers grum- 
bling at their continual interference.” 

“ Ay, educating them to make them slaves and bigots. 
They don’t teach them what they teach their own sons. 
Ijook at the miserable smattering of general information — just 
enough to serve as sauce for their great first and last lesson 
of ‘Obey the powers that be’ — \’vhatever they he; leave us 
alone in our comforts, and starv.) patiently ; do, like good 
boys, foi> it’s God’s will. And then, if a boy does show talent 
in school, do they help him up in life ] Not they ; when he 
has just learnt enough to whet his appetite for more, they 
turn him adrift again, to sink and drudge — to do his duty, as 
they call it, in that state of life to which society and the devil 
have called him.” 

“ But there are innumerable stories of great Englishmen 
who have risen from the lowest ranks.” 


18 


ALTON LOCK!-:, TAILOR AND POET. 


Ay ; but where are the stories of those who have not risen 
— of all the noble geniuses who have ended in desperation, 
drunkenness, starvation, suicide, because no one would take 
the trouble of lifting them up, and enabling them to walk in 
the path which nature had marked out for them? Dead 
men tell no tales; and this old whited sepulchre, society, ain’t 
going to turn informer against itself” 

“I trust and hope,” I said, sadly, “that if God intends me 
to rise. He will open the way for me ; perhaps the very strug- 
gles and sorrows of a poor genius may teach him more than 
ever wealth and prosperity could.” 

“ True, Alton my boy ! and that’s my only comfort. It 
does make men of us, this bitter battle of life. We working 
men, when we do come out of the furnace, come out, not tin- 
sel and papier mache, like those fops of red-tape statesmen, 
but steel and granite, Alton, my boy* — that has been seven 
times tried in the fire : and woe to the papier mache gentle- 
man that runs against us! But,” he went on, sadly, “for one 
who comes safe through the furnace, there are a hundred who 
crack in the burning. You are a young bear, my lad, with 
all your sorrows before you ; and you’ll find that a working 
man’s training is like the Red Indian children’s. The few 
who are strong enough to stand it grow up warriors; but all 
those who are not fire-and- water- proof by nature — -just die, 
Alton, my lad, and the tribe thinks itself well rid of them.” 

So that conversation ended. But it had implanted in my 
bosom a new seed of mingled good and evil, which was des- 
tined to bear fruit, precious perhaps as well as bitter. God 
knows it has hung on the tree long enough. Sour and harsh 
from the first, it has been many a year in ripening. But the 
sweetness of the apple, the potency of the grape, as the chem- 
ists tell us, are born out of acidity — a developed sourness. 
Will it be so with my thoughts ? Dare I assert, as I sit 
writing here, with the wild waters slipping past the cabin 
windows, backward and backward ever, every plunge of the 
vessel one forward leap from the old world — worn-out world, 
I had almost called it, of sham civilization and real penury — • 
dare I hope ever to return and triumph ? Shall I, after all, 
lay my bones among my own people, and hear the voices of 
freemen whisper in my dying ears? 

Silence, dreaming heart ! Sufficient for the day is the evil 
thereof — and the good thereof also. Would that I had known 
that before ! Above all, that I had known it on that night, 
when first the burning thought arose in ray heart, that I waa 


49 


ALTON L0:JKE. TAILOR AND JfOET. 

unjufttlji used ; that society had not given me iny rights. It 
came to me as a revelation, celestial-infernal, fail of glorious 
hopes of the possible future in store for me through the per- 
fect development of all rny faculties; and full, to“o, of fierce 
present rage, wounded vanity, bitter grudgings against those 
more favored than myself, which grow in time almost to 
cursing against the God avIio had made me a poor untutored 
working-man, and seemed to have given me genius only to 
keep me in a 'rantalus’-liell of unsatisfied thirst. 

Ay, respectable gentlemen and ladies, I will confess all to 
you you shall have, if you enjoy it, a fresh opportunity for 
indulging that supreme pleasure which the press daily affords 
you of insulting the classes whose powers most of you know as 
little as you do then* sufferings. Yes ; the Chartist poet is vain, 
conceited, ambitious, uneducated, shallow, inexperienced, en- 
vious, ferocious, scurrilous, seditious, traitorous. Is your char- 
itable vocabulary exhausted ? Then ask yourselves, how 
often have you yourself honestly resisted and conquered the 
temptation to any one of these sins, when it has come across 
you, just once in a way, and not as they came to me, as they 
come to thousands of the working men, daily and hourly, “ till 
their torments do, by length of time, become their elements?’' 
What, are we covetous, too ? Yes ! And if those who have, 
like you, still covet more, what wonder if those who have 
nothing, covet something 1 Profligate too % Well, though 
that imputation as a generality is utterly calumnious, though 
your amount of respectable animal enjoyment per annum is a 
hundred times as great as that of the most self-indulgent art- 
isan, yet if you had ever felt what it is to want, not only 
every luxury of the senses, but even bread to eat, you would 
think more mercifully of the man who makes up by rare ex- 
cesses, and those only of the limited kinds possible to him, for 
long intervals of dull privation, and says in his madness, “Let 
us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die !” We have our sins, 
and you. have yours. Ours may be the more gross and bar- 
baric, but yours are none the less damnable ; perhaps all the 
more so, for being the sleek, subtle, respectable, religious sins 
they are. You are frantic enough if our part of the press 
calls you hard names, but you can not see that your part of 
the press repays it back to us with interest. W e see those 
insults, and feel them bitterly enough ; and do not forget them, 
alas ! soon enough, while they pass unheeded by your delicate 
eyes as trivial truisms. Horrible, unprincipled, villainous, so- 
diliouS; frantic, blasphemous, arc epithets of course, when 


50 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


applied to — to how large a portion of the English people, yoa 
will some day discover to your astonishment. When will 
that day come and how ? In thunder, and storm, and gar- 
ments rolled in blood ? Or like the dew on the mown grass, 
and the clear shining of the sunlight after April rain ? 

Yes, it was true. Society had not given me my rights. 
And woe unto the man on whom that idea, true or false, rises 
lurid, filling all his thoughts with stifling glare, as of the pit 
itself Be it true, be it false, it is equally a woe to believe it ; 
to have to live on a negation ; to have to worship for our only 
idea, as hundreds of thousands of us have this day, the hatred 
of the things which are. Ay, though one of us, here and there, 
may die in faith, in sight of the promised land, yet is it not 
hard, when looking from the top of Pisgah into “ the good 
time coming,” to watch the years slipping away one by one, 
and death crawling nearer and nearer, and the people 
wearying themselves in the fire for very vanity, and Jor- 
dan not yet passed, the promised land not yet entered ? 
while our little children die around us, like lambs beneatli 
the knife, of cholera, and typhus, and consumption, and all 
the diseases which the good time can and will prevent ; 
v/hich, as science has proved, and you the rich confess, might 
be prevented at once, if you dared to bring in one bold and 
comprehensive measure, and not sacrifice yearly the lives 
of thousands to the idol of vested interests and a majority in 
the House. Is it not hard to men who smart beneath such 
things to help crying aloud — “Thou cursed Moloch-Mam- 
mon, take my life if thou wilt ; let me die in the wilderness, 
for I have deserved it ; but these little ones in mines and 
factories, in typhus-cellars, and Tooting pandemoniums, what 
have they done ? If not in their fathers’ cause, yet still in 
theirs, were it so great a sin to die upon a barricade ?” 

Or, after all, my working brothers, is it true of our promised 
land, even as of that Jewish one of old, that the iiriests' feet 
must first cross the mystic stream into the good land and 
large which God has prepared for us ? 

Is it so indeed 1 Then, in the name of the Lord of Hosts, 
ye priests of His, why will ye not aM^ake, and arise and go 
over Jordan, that the people of the Lord may follow you ? 

* * * • 


CHAPTER V. 


THE SKEPTIC’S MOTHER. 

My readers will perceive, from what I have detailed, that 
I was not likely to get any very positive ground of comfort 
from Crossthwaite ; and from within myself there was daily 
less and less hope of any. Daily the struggle became more 
intolerable between my duty to my mother, and my duty 
to myself — that inward thirst for mental self-improvement, 
which, without any clear consciousness of its sanctity or 
inspiration, I felt, and could not help feeling, that I mu?,t 
follow. No doubt it was very self-willed and ambitious of 
me to do that which rich men’s sons are flogged for not 
doing, and rewarded with all manner of prizes, scholarships, 
fellowships, for doing. But the nineteenth year is a time 
of life at which self-will is apt to exhibit itself in other people 
besides tailors ; and those religious persons who think it no 
sin to drive their sons on through classics and mathematics, 
in hopes of gaining them a station in life, ought not to be very 
hard upon me for driving myself on through the same path 
without any such selfish hope of gain — though perhaps the 
very fact of my having no wish or expectation of such ad- 
vantage will constitute in their eyes my sin and folly, and 
prove that I was following the dictates merely of a carnal 
lust, and not of a proper worldly prudence. I really do not 
wish to be flippant or sneering. I have seen the evil of it as 
much as any man, in myself and in my own class. But there 
are excuses for such a fault in the working-man. It does 
sour and madden him to be called presumptuous and ambi- 
tious for the very same aspirations which are lauded up to 
the skies in the sons of the rich — unless, indeed, he will do 
one little thing, and so make his peace with society. If he 
will desert his own class ; if he will try to become a sham 
gentleman, a parasite, and, if he can, a Mammonite, the 
world will compliment him on his noble desire to “rzse hi 
life"' He will have won his spurs, and be admitted into 
that exclusive pale of knighthood, beyond which it is a sin to 
carry arms even in selfdefense. But if the working genius 


52 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


dares to be true to Ills own class — to stay among tliem — to 
regenerate them — to defend them — to devote his talents to 
those among whom God placed him and brought him up — 
then he is the demagogue, the incendiary, the fanatic, the 
dreamer. So you would have the monopoly of talent, too, 
exclusive worldlings ? And yet you pretend to believe in the 
miracle of Pentecost, and the religion that was taught by the 
Carpenter’s Son, and preached across the world by fishermen ! 

I was several times minded' to argue the question out with 
my mother, and assert for myself the same independence of 
soul which I was now earning for my body by my wages. 
Once I had resolved to speak to her that very evening ; but 
strangely enough, happening to open the Bible, which, alas ! 
I did seldom at that time, my eye fell upon the chapter where 
Jesus, after having justified to His parents His absence in the 
Temple, while hearing the doctors and asking them questions, 
yet went down with them to Nazareth, after all, and was 
subject unto them. The story struck me vividly as a symbol 
of my own duties. But on reading further, I found more 
than one passage which seemed to me to convey a directly 
opposite lesson, where His mother and His brethren, fancying 
Him mad, attempted to interfere with His labors, and assert- 
ing their family rights as reasons for retaining Him, met with 
a peremptory rebuff! I puzzled my head for some time to 
find out which of the two cases was the more applicable to 
my state of self-development. The notion of asking for teach- 
ing from on high on such a point had never crossed me. In- 
deed, if it had, I did not believe sufficiently either in the story 
©r in the doctrines connected with it, to have tried such a 
resource. And so, as may be supposed, my growing self-con- 
ceit decided for me that the latter course was a fitting one. 

And yet I had not energy to carry it out. I was getting so 
worn out in body and mind from continual study and labor, 
stinted food and want of sleep, that I could not face the 
thought of an explosion, such as I knew must ensue, and I 
lingered on in the same unhappy state, becoming more and 
more morose in manner to my mother, while I was as assidu- 
ous as ever in all filial duties. But I had no pleasure in home. 
She seldom spoke to me. Indeed, there was no common topic 
about wdiich we could speak. Besides, ever since that fatal 
Sunday evening, I saw that she suspected me and watched 
me. I had good reason to believe that she set spies upon my 
conduct. Poor dear mother ! God forbid that I should accuse 
thee for a single care of thine, for a single suspicion even. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


53 


prompted as they all were by a mother’s anxious love. I 
would never have committed these things to paper, hadst thou 
not been far beyond the reach or hearing of them ; and only 
now, in hopes that they may serve as a warning, in some 
degree to mothers, but ten times more to children. For I 
sinned against thee, deeply and shamefully, in thought and 
deed, while thou didst never sin against me ; though all thy 
caution did but hasten the fatal explosion which came, and 
perhaps must have come, under some form or other, in 
any case. 

I had been detained one night in the shop till late ; and on 
my return my mother demanded, in a severe tone, the reason 
of my stay ; and on my telling her, answered as severely that 
she did not believe me ; that she had too much reason to sus- 
pect that I had been with bad companions. 

“ Who dared to put such a thought into your head ?” 

She/ “would not give up her authorities, but she had too 
much reason to believe them.” 

Again I demanded the name of my slanderer, and was re- 
fused it. And then I burst out, for the first time;n my life, 
mto a real fit of rage with her. I can not tell how I dared to 
say what I did, hut I was weak, nervous, irritable — my brain 
excited beyond all natural tension. Above all, I felt that she 
was unjust to me ; and my good conscience, as well as my 
pride, rebelled. 

“ You have never trusted me,” I cried ; “you have watched 
me — ” 

“Did you not deceive me once already 1” 

“And if I did,” I answered, more and more excited, “have 
I not slaved for you, stinted myself of clothes to pay your rent ? 
Have I not run to and fro for you like a slave, while I knew 
all the time you did not re.spect me or trust me ? If you had 
only treated me as a child and an idiot, I could have borne it. 
But you have been thinking of me all the while as an incar- 
nate fiend — dead in trespasses and sins — a child of wrath and 
the devil.* What right have you to be astonished if I should 
do my father’s works ?” 

“You may be ignorant of vital religion,” she answered; 
“ and you may insult me. But if you make a mock of God’s 
word, you leave my house. If you can laugh at religion, you 
can deceive me.” 

The pent-up skepticism of years burst forth. 

“Mother,” I said, “don’t talk to me about religion, and 
election, and conversion, and all that — I don’t believe one 


54 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


word of it. Nobody does, except good kind people — (like you, 
alas ! I was going to say, but the devil stopped the words at 
my lips) — who must needs have some reason to account for 
their goodness. That Bowyer — he’s a soft heart by nature, 
and as he is, so he does — religion has had nothing to do with 
that, any more than it has with that black-faced, canting 
scoundrel who has been telling you lies about me. Much his 
heart is changed. He carries sneak and slanderer written in 
his face — and sneak and slanderer he will be, elect or none. 
Religion ? Nobody believes in it. The rich don’t ; or they 
wouldn’t fill their churches up with pews, and shut the poor 
out, all the time they are calling them bi others. They be- 
lieve the gospel? Then why do they leave the men who 
make their clothes to starve in such hells on earth as our 
work-room ? No more do the tradespeople believe in it ; or 
they wouldn’t go home from sermon to sand the sugar, and 
put sloe-leaves in the tea, and send out lying puffs of their 
vamped-up goods, and grind the last farthing out of the poor 
creatures who rent their wretched stinking houses. And as 
for the workmen — they laugh at it all, I can tell you. Much 
good religion is doing for them ! You may see it’s fit only for 
women and children — for go where you will, church or chapel, 
you see hardly any thing but bonnets and babies ! I don’t 
believe a word of it — once and for all. I’m old enough to 
think for myself, <ind a free-thinker I will be, and believe 
nothing but what I know and understand.” 

I had hardly spoken the words, when I would have given 
worlds to recall them— rbut it was to be — and it was. 

Sternly she looked at me full in the face, till my eyes drop- 
ped before her gaze. Then she spoke steadily and slowly : 

“ Leave this house this moment. You are no son of mine 
henceforward. Do you think I will have my daughter pol- 
luted by the company of an infidel and a blasphemer ?” 

“ I will go,” I answered fiercely , “ I can get my own liv- 
ing, at all events !” And before I had time to think, I had 
rushed up-stairs, packed up my bundle, not forgetting the 
precious books, and was on my way through the frosty echo- 
ing streets under the cold glare of the winter’s moon. 

I had gone perhaps half a mile, when the thought of home 

rushed over me — the little room where I had spent my life 

the scene of all my childish joys and sorrows — which I should 
never see again, for I felt that my departure was for ever. 
Then I longed to see my mother once again— not to speak to 
her — for I was at once too proud and too cowardly to do that 


I 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


55 

—but to have a look at her through the window. One look, 
lor all the while, though I was boiling over with rage and 
indignation, I felt that it was all on the surface — that in the 
depths of our hearts I loved her and she loved me. And yet 
I wished to be angry, wished to hate her. Strange contra- 
diction of the flesh and spirit ! 

Hastily and silently I retraced my steps to the house. 
The gate was padlocked. I cautiously stole over the palings 
to the window — the shutter was closed and fast. I longed 
to knock — I lifted my hand to the door, and dare not ; indeed, 
I knew that it was" useless, in my dread of my mother’s habit 
of stern determination. That room — that mother I never 
saw again. I turned away ; sickened at heart, I was clam- 
bering back again, looking behind me toward the window, 
when I felt a strong grip on my collar, and turning round, 
had a policeman’s lantern flashed in my face 

“ Hullo, young ’un, and what do you want here ?” with a 
strong emphasis, after the fashion of policemen, on all his 
pronouns. 

“ Hush ! or you’ll alarm my mother 1” 

“ Oh ! eh ! Forgot the latch-key you sucking Don Juan 
that’s it, is it '? Late home from the Victory ?” 

I told him simply how the case stood, and entreated him 
to get me a night’s lodging, assuring him that my mother 
would not admit me, or I ask to be admitted. 

The policeman seemed puzzled, but after scratching his hat 
m lieu of his head for some seconds, replied, 

“ This here is the dodge — you goes outside and lies down 
on the kerb-stone ; whereby I espies you a-sleeping in the 
streets, contrary to act o’ parliament ; whereby it is my duty 
to take you to the station-house ; whereby you gets a night’s 
lodging free gracious for nothing, and company perwided by 
her Majesty.” 

‘‘ Oh, not to the station-house !” I criedy in shame and 
terror. 

“ Weny well ; then'you must keep moving all night con- 
tnualiy, whereby you avoids the hact ; or else you goes to a 
t vopenny-Tope shop and gets a lie down. And your bundle 
you’d best leave at my house. Twopenny-rope society a’n’t 
particular. I’m going ofl' my beat ; you walk home with 
me and leave your tra,ps. Every body knows me — Costello, 
V 21, that’s my number.” 

So on I v/ent with the kind-hearted man, who preached 
solemnly to me all the way on the fifth commandment. But 


56 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


I heard very little of it ; for before I had proceeded a quarter 
of a mile, a deadly faintness and dizziness came over me, I 
staggered, and fell against the railings. 

“And have you been a-drinking arter alii” 

“ I never — a drop in my life — nothing hut bread-and-w^atei 
this fortnight.” 

And it was true. I had hoen paying for my own food, and 
had stinted myself to such an extent, that between starvation, 
want of sleep, and over exertion, I was worn to a shadow, 
and the last drop had filled the cup ; the evening’s scene and 
its consequences had been too much for me, and in the middle 
of an attempt to explain matters to the policeman, I dropped 
on the pavement, bruising my face heavily. 

He picked me up, put me under one arm and my bundle 
under the other, and was proceeding on his march, when three 
men came rollicking up. 

“ Hullo, Poleax — Costello — What’s that ? Work for us 1 
A dem unpleasant body ?” 

“Oh, Mr. Bromley, sir I Hope you’re well, sir! Werry 
mm go this here, sir ! I finds this cove in the streets. He 
says his mother turned him out o’ doors. He seems very fair 
spoken, and very bad in he’s head, and very bad in he’s chest, 
and very bad in he’s legs, he does. And I can’t come to no 
conclusion respecting my conduct in this here pase, nohow ! ’ 

“ Memorialize the Health of Towns Commission,” sug 
gested one. 

“ Bleed him in the great toe/’ said the second. 

“ Put a blister on the back of his left eye-ball,” said a 
third. 

“ Case of male asterisks,” observed the first. Rj. Aquae 
pumpis purae quantum suff’. Applicatur extero pro re nata. 
J. Bromley, M.D., and don’t he wish he may get through !’ 

“ Tip us your daddle, my boy,” said the second speaker. 
I’ll tell you what, Bromley, this fellow’s very bad. He’s got 
no more pulse than the Pimlico sewer. Run him into the 
next pot’iis. Here — you lay hold of him, Bromley — that 
last round with the cabman nearly put my humerus out.” 

The huge, burly, pea-jacketed medical student — for such I 
saw at once he vras — laid hold of me on the right, tenderly 
enough, and walked me off between him and the policeman. 

I fell again into a faintness, from which I was awakened 
by being shoved through the folding-doors of a gin shop, into 
a glare of light and hubbub of blackguardism, and placed on 
a settle, while my conductor called out, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


57 


“ Pots 'round, Mary, and a go of brandy hot with, for the 
patient. Here, young ’un ; toss it off, it’ll make your hair 
grow.” 

I feebly answered that I never had drunk any thing stronger 
than water. 

“ High time to begin then ; no wonder you’re so ill. Weil, 
if you won’t. I’ll make you — ” 

And taking my head under his arm, he seized me by the 
nose, while another poured the liquor down my throat — and 
certainly it revived me at once. 

A drunken drab pulled another drunken drab off the settle 
to make room for the “ poor young man and I sat there 
with a confused notion that something strange and dreadful 
had happened to me^ while the party drained their respective 
quarts of porter, and talked over the last boat-race with the 
Leander. v 

“ Now then, gen’l’men,” said the policeman, “if you think 
he’s recovered, we’ll take him home to his mother ; she ought 
for to take him in, surely.” 

“Yes, if she has as much heart in her as a dried walnut.’' 

But I resisted stoutly ; though I longed to vindicate my 
mother’s affection, yet I could not face her. I entreated to 
be taken to the station-house ; threatened, in my desperation, 
to break the bar glasses, which, like Doll Tearsheet’s abuse, 
only elicited from the policeman a solemn “Very well and, 
under the unwonted excitement of the brandy, struggled so 
fiercely, and talked so incoherently, that the medical students 
interfered. 

“ We shall have this fellow in phrenitis, or laryngitis, or 
dothen-enteritis, or some other itis, before long, if he’s aggra- 
vated.” 

“ And whichever it is, it’ll kill him. He has no more 
stamina left than a yard of pump water.” 

“ I should consider him chargeable to the parish,” suggest- 
ed the bar-keeper.” 

“ Exactually so, my Solomon of licensed victualers. Get 
a workhouse order for him, Costello.” 

“And I should consider, also, sir,” said the licensed vic- 
tualer, with increased importance, “ having been a guardian 
myself, and knowing the hact, as the parish couldn’t refuse, 
because they’re in power to recover all hexpenses out of his 
mother.” 

“ To be sure ; it’s all the unnatural old witch’s fault.” 

“ No, it is not,” said I, faintly. 


58 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“Wait till your opinion’s asked, yojng un. Go kick up 
the authorities, policeman.” ’ 

“Now I’ll just tell you how that’ll work, gemmen,’’’ an- 
swered the policeman, solemnly., “I goes to the overseer — 
werry good sort o’ man — but he’s in bed. I knocks for half 
an hour. He puts he’s nightcap out o’ windy, and sends me 
to the relieving officer. Werry good sort of man lie too ; but 
he’s in bed. I knocks for another half hour. He puts he’s 
nightcap out o’ windy — sends me to the medical officer for a 
certificate. Medical officer’s gone to a midwifery case. I 
hunts him for an hour or so. He’s got hold of a babby with 
three heads, or summat else ; and two more women a-calling 
out for him like blazes. ‘ He’ll come to-morrow morning.’ 
Now, I just axes your opinion of that there most procrastina- 
tionest go.” 

The big student, having cursed the parochial authorities in 
general, offered to pay for my night’s lodging at the public- 
house. The good man of the house demurred at first, but 
relented on being reminded of the value of a medical student’s 
custom ; whereon, without more ado, two of the rough dia- 
monds took me between them, carried me up-stairs, undressed 
me, and put me into bed, as tenderly as if they had been 
women. 

“ He’ll have the tantrums before morning, I’m afraid,” 
said one. 

“ Very likely to turn to typhus,” said the other. 

“ Well, I suppose — it’s a horrid bore, but 

“ What must be must 5 man is but dust, 

If you can’t get crumb, you must just eat crust. 

Send me up a go of hot with, and I’ll sit up with him ti.l 
he’s asleep, dead, or better.” 

“Well, then. I’ll stay too; we may just as well make a 
night of it here as well as any where else.” 

And he pulled a short black pipe out of his pocket, and sat 
down to meditate, with his feet on the hobs of the empty 
grate ; the other man went down for the liquor ; while I, 
between the brandy and exhaustion fell fast asleep, and never 
stirred till I woke the next morning with a racking headache, 
and saw the big student standing by my bedside, having, as 
I afterward heard, sat by me till four in the morning. 

“ Hullo, young ’un, come to your senses'? Headache, eh ? 
Slightly comato-crapulose ? We’ll give you some soda and 
eal volatile, and I’ll pay for your breakfast.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


59 


And so he did, and when he was joined hy his companions 
on their way to St. George’s, they were very anxious, having 
heard my story, to force a few shillings on me “ for luck,” 

, which, 1 need not say, I peremptorily refused, assuring them 
that I could and 'would get my owm living, and never take a 
farthing from any man. 

“ That’s a plucky dog, though he's a tailor,” I heard them 
say, as, after overwhelming them with thanks, and vowing, 
amid shouts of laughter, to repay them every farthing I had 
cost them, I took my way, sick and stunned, toward my dear 
old Sandy Mackaye’s street. 

|i Rough diamonds indeed! I have never met you again, 

1 1 but I have not forgotten you. Your early life may be a 
coarse, too often a profligate one — but you know the people, 
and the people know you ; and your tenderness and care, be- 
stowed without hope of repayment, cheers daily many a poor 
soul in hospital wards and fever-cellars — to meet its reward 
some day at the people’s hands. You belong to us at heart, 
as the Paris barricades can tell. Alas ! for the society which 
stifles in after-life too many of your better feelings, hy making 
you more flunkies and parasites, dependent for your livelihood 
on the caprices and luxuries of the rich. 


CHAPTER VI. 


THE DULWICH GALLERY. ' 

Sandy Mackaye received me in a characteristic way- 
growled at me for half an hour for quarreling with my mothei, 
and when I was at my wit’s' end, suddenly ofi’ered me a bed 
in his house and the use of his little sitting-room — and, bliss 
too great to hope ! of his books also ; and when I talked of 
payment, told me to hold my tongue and mind my own busi- 
ness. So I settled myself at once ; and that very evening he 
installed himself as my private tutor, took down a Latin book, 
and set me to work on it. 

“ An’ mind ye, laddie,” said he, half in jest and half in 
earnest, “ gin I find ye playing truant, and reading a’ sorts o’ 
nonsense instead of minding the scholastic methods and pro- 
prieties, I’ll just bring ye in a bill at the year’s end o’ twa 
guineas a week for lodgings and tuition, and tak the law o’ ye , 
so mind and read what I tell ye. Do ye comprehend noo V‘ 

I did comprehend, and obeyed him, determining to repay 
him some day — and somehow — how I did not very clearly 
see. Thus I put myself more or less into the old man’s 
power ; foolishly enough, the wise world will say. But I had 
no suspicion in my character ; and I could not look at those 
keen gray eyes, when, after staring into vaeancy during some 
long preachment, they suddenly flashed round at me, and 
through me, full of fun and quaint thought, and kindly 
earnestness, and fancy that man less honest than his face 
seemed to proclaim him. 

By-the-by, I have as yet given no description of the old 
eccentric’s abode^an unpardonable omission, I suppose, in 
these days of Dutch painting and Boz. But the omission 
was correct, both historically and aristically, for I had as yet 
only gone to him for books, books, nothing but books ; and I 
had been blind to every thing in his shop but that fairy-land 
of shelves, filled, in my simple fancy, with inexhaustible 
treasures, wonder-working, omnipotent, as the magic seal of 
Solomon. * 

It was not till I had been settled and at work for several 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Cl 


nights ill his sanctum, behind the shop, that I began to be- 
come conscious what a strang<?den that sanctum was. 

It was so dark, that without a gas-light no one hut he 
could see to read there, except on very sunny days. Not only 
were the shelves which covered every inch of wall crammed 
with l^oks and pamphlets, but the little window was blocked 
up with them, the floor was piled with bundles of them, in 
some places three feet deep, apparently in the wildest confu- 
sion — though there was some mysterious order in them which 
he understood, and symbolized, I suppose, by the various 
strange and ludicrous nick-names on their tickets — for he 
never was at fault a moment if a customer asked for a book, 
though it were buried deep in the chaotic stratum. Out of 
this book-alluvium a hole seemed to have been dug near the 
fireplace, just big enough to hold his arm-chair and a table, 
book-strewn like every thing else, and garnished with odds 
and ends of MSS., and a snufler-tray containing scraps of 
half smoked tobacco, “ pipe-dottles,” as he called them, which 
were carefully resmoked over and over again, till nothing but 
ash was left. His wdiole culinary utensils — for he cooked as 
well as ate in this strange hold — were an old rusty kettle, 
which stood on one hob, and a blue plate which, when wash- 
ed, stood on the other. A barrel of true Aberdeen meal 
peered^ out of a corner, half buried in books, and “ a keg o’ 
whusky, the gift o’ freens,” peeped in like case out of another. 

This was his only food. “It was a’ poison,” he used to 
say, “in London. Bread full o’ alum and bones, and sic filth 
— meat over-driven till it was a’ braxy — water sopped wi’ 
dead men’s juice. Naething was safe but gude Scots par- 
ritch and Athol brose.” He carried his water-horror so far 
as to walk some quarter of a mile every morning to fill his 
kettle at a favorite pump. “ Was he a cannibal, to drink 
out o’ that pump hard-by, right under the kirkyard V' ^ut 
it was little he either ate or drank — he seemed to live upon 
tobacco. From four in the morning till twelve at night, the 
pipe never left his lips, except when he went into the outer 
shop. “It promoted meditation, and drove awa’ the lusts o’ 
the flesh. Echl it was worthy o’ that auld tyrant Jamie, 
to write his counter-blast to the poor man’s freen ! The 
hypocrite I to gang preaching the virtues o’ evil-savored 
smoke ‘ ad dtemones abigendos’ — and then rail again tobacco, 
as if it was no as gude for the purpose as auld rags and horn 
shavings ?” 

Sandy Macka) e had a great fancy for political caricatures, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


G2 

rows of which, there being no room for them on the walls, 
hung on strings from the ceiling — like clothes hung out to dry 
— and among them dangled various books to which he had 
taken an antipathy, principally High Tory and Benthamite, 
crucified, impaled through their covers, and suspended in all 
sorts of torturing attitudes. Among them, right over the 
table, figured a copy of Icon Basilike, dressed up in a paper 
shirt, all drawn over with figures of flames and devils, and 
surmounted by a peaked paper cap, like a victim at an auto 
da-fe. And in the midst of all this chaos grinned from the 
chimney-piece, among pipes and pens, pinches of salt and 
scraps of butter, a tall cast of Michael Angelo’s well known 
skinless model — his pristine white defaced by a cap of soot 
upon the top of his scalpless skull, and every muscle and ten- 
don thrown into horrible relief by the dirt which had lodged 
among the cracks. There it stood, pointing with its ghastly 
arm toward the door, and holding on its wrist a label with 
the following inscription : 

Here stand I, the working-man, 

Get more off me if you can. 

I questioned Mackaye one evening about those hanged and 
crucified books, and asked him if he ever sold any of them. 

“ Ou, ay,” he said ; “if folks are fools enough to ask for 
them. I’ll just answer a fool according to his folly.” 

“But,” I said, “Mr. Mackaye, do you think it right to sell 
books of the very opinions of which you disapprove so much 

“ Hoot, laddie, it’s just a spoiling o’ the Egyptians; so mind 
yer book, and dinna tak in hand cases o’ conscience for ither 
folk. Ye’ll ha’ wark eneugh wi’ yer ain before yehe dune.” 

And he folded round his knees his Joseph’s coat, as he 
called it, an old dressing-gown with one plaid sleeve, and one 
blue one, red shawl skirts, and a black broadcloth iDack, not 
to*mention innumerable patches of every imaginable stuff and 
color, filled liis pipe, and buried his nose in “ Harringtoi/s 
Oceana.” He read at least twelve hours every day of his 
life, and that exclusively old history and politics, though his 
favorite books were Thomas Carlyle’s works. Two or three 
evenings in the week, when he had seen me safe settled at 
my studies, he used to disappear mysteriously for several hours, 
and it was some time before I found out, by a chance ex- 
pression, that he was attending some meeting or committee 
of working men. I begged him to take me there with him. 
But I M^as stopped by a laconic answer. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


63 


“ When ye’re ready.” 

“And when shall 1 be ready, Mr. Mackaye'^” 

“ Read ycr book till I tell ye.” 

And he twisted himsell in his best coat, which had once 
been black, squeezed on his little Scotch cap, and went out. 

I now found myself, as the reader may suppose, in an ele- 
ment far more congenial to my literary tastes, and which 
compelled far less privation of sleep and food in order to find 
time and means for reading ; and my health began to mend 
from the very first day. But the thought of my mother 
haunted me ; and Mackaye seemed in no hurry to let me 
escape from it, for he insisted on my writing to her in a peni- 
tent strain, informing her of my whereabouts, and offering to 
return home if she should wish it. With feelings strangely 
mingled between the de.sire of seeing her again and the dread 
of returning to the old drudgery of surveillance, I sent the 
letter, and waited a whole week without any answer. At 
last, one evening, when I returned from work, Sandy seemed 
in a state of unusual exhilaration. He looked at me again 
and again, winking and chuckling to himself in a way which 
showed me that his good spirits had something to do with my 
concerns ; but he did not open on the subject till T had set- 
tled to my evening’s reading. Then, having brewed himself 
an unusually strong mug of whisky-toddy, and brought out 
with great ceremony a clean pipe, he commenced. 

“ Alton, laddie, I’ve been fiechting Philistines for ye the 
day,” 

“ Ah I have you heard from my mother ?” 

“ I wadna say that exactly ; but there’s been a gran baillie 
body wi’ me that calls himsel’ your uncle, and a braw young 
callant, a bairn o’ his, I’m thinking.” 

“ Ah ! that’s my cousin George ; and tell me — do tell mo, 
what you said to them.” 

“ Ou — that’ll be mair concern o’ mine than o’ yourn. But 
ye’re no going back to your mither.” 

My heart leaped up with — joy ; there is no denying it — 
and then I burst into tears. 

“And she won’t see me ? Has she really cast me off?” 

“ Why, that’ll be verra much as ye prosper, I’m thinking. 
Ye’re an unaccreedited hero, the noo, as Thomas Carlyle has 
. it. ‘ But gin ye do weel by yoursel,’ saith the Psalmist, 
‘ ye’ll find a’ men speak well o’ ye’ — if ye gang their gate 
But ye’re to gang to see your uncle at his shop o’ Monday 


64 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

next, at one o’clock. Now stint your greeting, and read 
awa’.” 

On the next Monday I took a holiday, the first in which I 
had ever indulged myself; and having spent a good hour in 
scrubbing away at my best shoes and Sunday suit, started, in 
fear and trembling, for rny uncle’s “establishment.” 

I was agreeably surprised, on being shown into the little 
back office at the back of the shop, to meet with a tolerably 
gracious reception from the good-natured Mammonite. He 
did not shake hands with me, it is true ; was I not a poor 
relation ? But he told me to sit down, commended me for 
the excellent character which he had of me both from my 
master and Mackaye, and then entered on the subject of my 
literary tastes. He heard I was a precious clever fellow. 
No wonder, I came of a clever stock ; his poor dear brother 
had plenty of brains for every thing but business. “ And you 
see, my boy (with a glance at the big ledgers and busy shop 
without), “ I knew a thing or two in my time, or I should not 
have been here. But without capital, I think brains a curse, 
Still we must make the best of a bad matter ; and if you are 
inclined to help to raise the family name — not that I think 
much of book writers myself — poor starving devils, half of 
them — but still people do talk about them — and a man might 
get a snug thing as newspaper editor, with interest ; or clerk 
to something or other — always some new company in the 
wind now — and I should have no objection, if you seemed 
likely to do us credit, to speak a word for you. I’ve none of 
your mother’s confounded puritanical notions, T can tell you ; 
and, what’s more, I have, thank Heaven, as fine a. city con- 
nection as any man. But you must mind and make yourself 
a good accountant — learn double entry on the Italian method 
— that’s a good practical study ; and if that old Sawney is 
soft enough to teach you other things gratis, he may as well 
teach you that too. I’ll bet he knows something about it — 
the old Scotch fox. There now — that’ll do— there’s five 
shillings for you — mind you don’t lose them — and if I hear a 
good account of you, why, perhaps — but there’s no use making 
promises.” 

At this moment a tall, handsome young man, whom 1 did 
not at first recognize as my cousin George, swung into the 
office, and shook me cordially by the hand.' 

“ Hullo, Alton, how are you 'I Why, I hear you’re coming 
out as a regular genius — breaking out in a new place, upon 
my honor ! Have you done with him, governor ?” 


ALTON LOCKE TAILOR AND POET. 


65 


“Well, I think I have. I wish you’d have a talk with 
him, my boy, I’m sorry I can’t see more of him, but I have 
to meet a party on business at the West-end at two, and 
Alderman Tumbril and family dine with us this evening, 
don’t they ? I think our small table will be full.” 

“ Of course it will. Come along with me, and we’ll have 
a chat in some quiet out-of-the-way place. This city is really 
so noisy that you can’t hear your own ears, as our dean says 
in lecture.” 

So he carried me off, down hack streets and alleys, a little 
puzzled at the extreme cordiality ©f his manner. Perhaps it 
sprung, asT learned afterward to suspect, from his consistent 
and perpetual habit of ingratiating himself with every one 
whom he approached. He never cut a chimney-sweep if he 
knew him. And he found it pay. The children of this world 
are in their generation wiser than the children of light. 

Perhaps it sprung also, as I began to suspect in the first 
hundred yards of our walk, from the desire of showing ofi' 
before me the university clothes, manners, and gossip, which 
he had just brought back with him from Cambridge. 

I had not seen him more than three or lour times in my 
life before, and then he appeared to me merely a tall, hand- 
some conceited, slangy boy. But I now found him much im- 
proved — in all externals at least. He had made it his busi- 
ness, I knew, to perfect himself in all athletic pursuits which 
were open to a Londoner. . As he told me that day — he found 
it pay, when one got among gentlemen. Thus he had gone 
up to Cambridge a capital skater, rower, pugilist — and bil- 
liard player. Whether or not that last accomplishment ought 
to be classed in the list of athletic sports, he contrived, by his 
own account, to keep it in that of paying ones In both these 
branches he seemed to have had plenty of opportunities of dis- 
tinguishing himself at college ; and his tall, powerful figure 
showed the fruit of these exercises in a stately and confident, 
almost martial, carriage. Something jaunty, perhaps swag- 
gering, remained still in his air and dress, which yet sat not 
ungracefully on him ; but I could see that he had been mix- 
ing in society more polished and artificial than that to which 
we had either of us been accustomed, and in his smart Roch- 
ester, well-cut trowsers, and delicate French boots, he ex- 
cited, I will not deny it, my boyish admiration and envy. 

“Well,” he said, as soon as we were out of the shop, 
“ which way 1 Got a holiday 1 And how did you intend 
to spend it ]” 


6G ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

“I wanted very much,” I said, meekly to see the pic- 
tures at the National Gallery.” 

“ Oh ' ah ! pictures don’t pay ; but, if you like — much bet- 
ter ones at Dulwich — that’s the place to go to — you can see 
the others any day — arid at Dulwich, you know, they’ve got 
— why let me see — ” And he ran over half-a-dozen outland- 
ish names of painters, which, as I have never again met with 
them, I am inclined on the whole to consider as somewhat 
extemporaneous creations. However, I agreed to go. 

“ Ah ! capital — very nice quiet walk, and convenient for 
me — very little out of rny way home. I’ll walk there with 
you.” 

“ One word for your neighbor and two for yourself,” thought 
I ; but on we walked. To see good pictures had been a long- 
cherished hope of mine. Every thing beautiful in form or 
color was beginning of late to have an intense fascination for 
me. I had, now that I was emancipated, gradually dared to 
feed my greedy eyes by passing stares into the print-shop 
windows, and had learnt from them a thousand new notions, 
new emotions, now longings after beauties of Nature, which 
seemed destined never to bo satisfied. But pictures, above 
all, foreign ones, had been, in my mother’s eyes. Anathema 
Maranatha, as vile Popish and Pagan vanities, the rags of 
the scarlet woman, no less than the surplice itself — and now, 
when it came to the point, I hesitated at an act of such awful 
disobedience, even though unknown to her. My cousin, how- 
ever, laughed down my scruples, told me I was out of leading- 
strings now, and, which was true enough, that it was “a — 
deal better to amuse oneself in picture galleries without leave, 
than live a life of sneaking and lying under ^petticoat govern- 
ment, as all home-birds were sure to do in the long run.” 
And so I went on, while my cousin kept up a running fire 
of chat the whole way, intermixing shrewd, bold observations 
upon every woman who passed, with sneers at the fellows of 
the college to which we were going — their idleness and luxury 
— the large grammar-school which they were bound by their 
charter to keep up, and did not — and hints about private 
interest in high quarters, through which their wealthy useless- 
ness had been politely overlooked, when all similar institutions 
in the kingdom were subject to the searching examination of 
a government commission. Then there were stories of boat- 
races and gay noblemen, breakfast parties, and lectures on 
Greek plays, flavored with a spice of Cambridge slang, all 
equally new to me — glimpses into a world of wcn lers- which 


I 


ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND POET. C7 

made me feel, as I shambled along at his side, trying to keep 
step with his strides, more weakly and awkward and ignorant 
than ever. 

We entered the gallery. I was in a fever of expectation. 

The rich sombre light of the rooms, the rich heavy w'armth 
of the stove-heated air, the brilliant and varied coloring and 
gilded frames which embroidered the walls, the hushed earn- 
estness of a few artists who were copying, and the few visitors 
who were lounging from picture to ])icture, struck me at once 
with mysterious awe. But my attention was in a moment 
concentrated on one figure opposite to me at the furthest 
end. I hurried straight toward it. When I had got half- 
way up the gallery I looked round for my cousin. He had 
turned aside to some picture of a Venus which caught my eye 
also, hut which, I remember now, only raised in me then a 
shudder and a blush, and a fancy that the clergymen must he 
really as bad as my mother had taught me to believe, if they 
could allow in their galleries pictures of undressed women, f 
have learnt to view such things differently now, thank God. 
I have learnt that to the pure all things are pure. I have 
learnt the meaning of that great saying — the foundation of all 
art, as well as all modesty, all love, which tells us how “ the 
man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.” But 
this book is the history of my mental growth ; and my mistakes 
as well as my discoveries are steps in that development, and 
may bear a lesson in them. 

How I have rambled I But as that day was the turning 
point of my whole short life, I may be excused for lingering 
upon every feature of it. 

Timidl^", but eagerly, I went up to the picture, and stood 
entranced before it. It was Guido’s St. Sebastian. All the 
world knows the picture, and all the world knows, too, the 
defects of the master, though in this instance he seems to have 
risen above himself, by a sudden inspiration, into that true 
naturalness, which is the highest expression of the Spiritual. 
But the very defects of the picture, its exaggeration, its 
theatricality, were especially calculated to catch the eye of a 
hoy awaking out of the narrow dullness of Puritanism. The 
breadth and vastness of light and shade upon those manly 
limbs, so grand and yet so delicate, standing out against the 
background of lurid night, the helplessness of the bound arms, 
the arrow quivering in the shrinking side, the upturned hrow, 
the eyes in whose dark depths enthusiastic faith seemed con- 
quering agony and shame, the parted lips, which seemed to 


I ■ 

68 ALTON LOCKE, TAUOR AND POET. 

ask, like those martyrs in the Rc.velations, reproachful, half- 
resigned, “O Lord 'how long] — ” Gazing at that picture 
since, I have understood how the idolatry of painted saints 
could arise in the minds even of the most educated, who were 
not disciplined hy that stern regard for fact which is — or ought 
to he — the strength of Englishmen. I have understood the 
heart of that Italian girl, whom some such picture of St. 
Sebastian, perhaps this very one, excited, as the Venus of 
Praxiteles the Grecian boy, to hopeless love, madness, and 
death. Then I had never heard of St. Sebastian. I did not 
dream of any connection between that, or indeed any picture, 
and Christianity ; and yet, as I stood before it, I seemed to 
be face to face with the ghosts of rny old Puritan forefathers, 
to see the spirit which supported them on pillories and 
scaffolds — the spirit of that true St. Margaret, the Scottish 
maiden whom Claverhouse and his soldiers chained to a post 
on the sea-sands to die by inches in the rising tide, till the 
sound of her hymns was slowly drowned in the dash of the 
hungry, leaping waves. My heart swelled within me, my eyes 
seemed bursting from my head, with the intensity of my gaze, 
and great tears, I knew not why, rolled slowly down my face. 

A woman’s voice close to me, gentle yet of deeper cone than 
most, woke me from my trance. 

“ You seem to be deeply interested in that picture ?” 

I looked round, yet not at the speaker. My eyes, before they 
could meet hers, were caught by an apparition the most beau- 
tiful I had ever yet beheld. And what — what — have I seen 
equal to her since ? Strange, that I should love to talk of 
her. Strange, that I fret at myself now because I can not 
set down on paper line by line, and hue by hue, that wonderful 

loveliness of which But no matter. Had I but such 

an imagination as Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, had I his de- 
liberate cold self-consciousness, what volumes of similes and 
conceits I might pour out, connecting that peerless face and 
figure with all lovely things which heaven and earth contain. 
As it is, because I can not say all, I will say nothing, but re- 
peat to the end again and again, Beautiful, beautiful, beau- 
tiful, beyond all statue, picture, or poet’s dream. Seventeen 
— slight but rounded, a mask and features delicate and reg- 
ular, as if fresh from the chisel of Praxiteles — I must try to 
describe, after all, you see — a skin of alabaster (privet flowers, 
Horace and Ariosto would have said, more true to Nature), 
stained with the faintest flush : auburn hair, with that pecu- 
liar crisped wave seen in the old Italian pictures, and the 




ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


69 


warm, dark hazel eyes which so often accompany it; lips like 
a thread of vermilion, somewhat too thin, perhaps — but 1 
thought little of that then ; with such perfect finish and grace 
in every line and hue of her features and her dress, down to 
the little fingers and nails which showed through her thin 
gloves, that she seemed to my fancy fresh from the innermost 
chamber of some enchanted palace, “ where no air of heaven 
could visit her cheek too roughly.” I dropped my eyes, quite 
dazzled. The question was repeated by a lady who stood 
with her, whose face I remarked then — as I did to the last, 
alas ! — too little ; dazzled at the first by outward beauty, 
perhaps because so utterly unaccustomed to it. 

“It is indeed a wonderful picture,” I said, timidly. “May 
I ask what is the subject of it V 

“ Oh 1 don’t you know?” said the young beauty, with a 
smile that thrilled through me. “It is St. Sebastian.” 

“I — I am very much ashamed,” I answered, coloring up, 
“ but I do not know Avho St. Sebastian was. Was he a 
Popish saint ?” 

A tall, stately old man, who stood with the two ladies, 
laughed kindly. “No, not till they made him one against his 
will ; and at the same time, by putting him in the mill which 
grinds old folks young again, converted him from a grizzled 
old Roman tribune into the young Ap'ollo of Popery.” 

“You will puzzle your hearer, my dear uncle,” said the. 
same deep-toned woman’s voice which had first spoken to me. 
“As you volunteered the saint’s name, Lillian, you shall also 
tell his history.” 

Simply and shortly, with just feeling enough to send through 
me a fresh thrill of delighted interest, without trenching the 
least on the most stately reserve, she told me the well-known 
history of the saint’s martyrdom. 

If I seem minute in my description, let those who read my 
story remember that such courteous dignity, however natural, 
I am bound to believe, it is to them, was to me an utterly 
new excellence in human nature. All my mother’s Spartan 
nobleness of manner seemed unexpectedly combined with all 
my little sister’s careless ease. 

“ What a beautiful poem the story would make !” said I, 
as soon as I recovered my thoughts. 

“Well spoken, young man,” answ’ered the old gentleman. 
“Let us hope that your seeing a subject for a good poem will 
be the first step toward your writing one.” 

As he spoke, he bent on mo two clear gray eyes, full of 


70 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

kindliness, mingled with practiced discernment. I saw that 
he was evidently a clergyman ; hut what his tight silk stock- 
ings and peculiar hat denoted I did not know. There was 
about him the air of a man accustomed equally to thought, 
to men, and to power. And I remarked somewhat mali- 
ciously, that my cousin, who had strutted up toward us, on 
seeing me talking to two ladies, the instant he caught sight 
of those black silk stockings and that strange hat, fell sud- 
denly in countenance, and sidling off somewhat meekly into 
the back-ground, became absorbed in the examination of a 
Holy Family. 

I answered something humbly, I forget what, which led to 
a conversation. They questioned me as to my name, my 
mother, my business, my studies ; while I reveled in the de- 
light of stolen glances at my new-found Venus Victrix, who 
was as forward as any of them in her questions and her in- 
terest. Perhaps she enjoyed, at least she could not help 
seeing, the admiration for herself which I took no pains to 
conceal. At last the old man cut the conversation short by a 
quiet “Good morning, sir,” wdiich astonished me. I had 
never heard words whose tone was so courteous and yet so 
chillingly peremptory. As they turned away, he repeated to 
himself once or twice, as if to fix them in his mind, my name 
and my master’s, and awoke in me, perhaps too thoughtlessly, 
a tumult of vague hopes. Once and again the beauty and her * 
companion looked baek toward me, and seemed talking of mo, 
and my face was burning scarlet, w'hen my cousin swung up 
in his hard, offhand way. 

“By Jove, Alton, my boy! you’re a knowing fellow. I 
congratulate you ! At your years, indeed ! to rise a dean and 
tw'o beauties at the first throw, and hook them fast !” 

“A dean !” I said, in some trepidation. 

“Ay, a live dean — didn’t you see the eleven foot sticking 
out from under his shoe-buckle 1 What news for your mother ! 
What will the ghosts of your grandfathers to the seventh gen- 
eration say to' this, Alton % Colloguing in pagan picture- 
galleries with shovel-hatted Philistines ! And that’s not the 
worst, Alton,” he ran on. “ Those daughters of Moab — those 
daughters of Moab — ” 

“Hold your tongue,” I said, almost crying with vexation. 

“ Look there, if you want to save your good temper. There, 
she is looking back again — not at poor me, though. What 
a lovely girl she is ! — and a real lady — Vair noble — the ra’al 
genuine grit, as Sam Slick says, and no mistake. By Jove, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


71 


■what a face ! what hands ! what feet ! what a figure — in 
spite of crinolines and all abominations ! And didn’t she know 
it ? And didn’t she know that you knew it too V’ And he 
ran on, descanting coarsely on beauties which I dared not even 
have profaned by naming, in a way that made me, I knew 
not why, mad with jealousy and indignation. She seemed 
mine alone in all the w'orld. What right had any other 
human being, above all, he, to dare to mention her 'I I turned 
again to my St. Sebastian. That movement only brought on 
me a fresh volley of banter. 

“Oh, that’s the dodge, is it, to catch intellectual fine ladies? 
to fall into an ecstatic attitude before a picture — But then we 
must have Alton’s genius, you know, to find out which the 
fine pictures are. I must read up that subject, by-the-by. 
It might be a paying one among the dons. For the present, 
here goes in for an attitude. Will this do, Alton ?” And he 
arranged himself admiringly before the picture in an attitude 
so absurd and yet so graceful, that I did not know whether 
to laugh at him or hate him. 

“ At all events,” he added, dryly, “ it will be as good as 
playing the evangelical at Carus’s tea-parties, or taking the 
eacrament regularly for fear one’s testimonials should be re- 
fused.” And then he looked at me, and through me, in his 
intense, confident way, to see that his hasty words had not 
injured him with me. He used to meet one’s eye as boldly 
as any man I ever saw ; but it was not the simple gaze of 
honesty and innocence, but an imperious, searchina: look, as 
if defying scrutiny. His was a true mesmeric eye, if ever 
there was one. No wonder it worked the miracles it did. 

“ Come along,” he said, suddenly seizing my arm*. “Don’t 
you see they’re leaving ? Out of the gadery after them, and 
get a good look at the carriage and the arms upon it. I saw 
one standing there as we came in. It may pay us — you, that 
is — to know it again.” 

We went out, I holding him back, I knew not why, and 
arrived at the outer gate just in time to see them enter the 
carriage and drive ofi’. I gazed to the last, but did not stir. 

“ Good boy,” he said ; “ knowing still. If you had bowed 
or showed the least sign of recognition, you would have broken 
the spell.” 

But I hardly heard what he said, and stood gazing stupidly 
after the carriage as it disappeared. I did not know then 
what had happened to me. I know now, alas ! too well. 


CHAPTER VII. 

FIRST LOVE. 

Truly I said, I did not know what had happened to nie. 
I did not attempt to analyze the intense, overpow^ering instinct 
which from that moment made the lovely vision I had seen 
the lodestar of all my thoughts. Even now, I can see noth- 
ing in those feelings of mine but simple admiration — idolatry 
if you will — of physical beauty. Doubtless there was more — 
doubtless — I had seen pretty faces before, and knew that they 
were pretty, hut they had passed from my retina, like the 
prints of beauties which I saw in the shop windows, without 
exciting a thought — even a conscious emotion of complacency, 
But this face did not pass away. Day and night I saw it, 
just as I had seen it in the gallery. The same playful smile — 
the same glance, alternately turned to me and the glowing 
picture above her head — and that was all I saw or felt. No 
child ever nestled upon its mother’s shoulder with feelings 
more celestially pure, than those with which I counted over 
day and night each separate lineament of that exceeding love- 
liness. Romantic ? extravagant ] Yes ; if the world be 
right in calling a passion romantic just in proportion as it is 
not merely hopeless, but pure and unselfish, drawing its deli- 
cious power from no hope or faintest desire of enjoyment, but 
merely from simple delight in its object — then my passion 
was most romantic. I never thought of disparity in rank. 
Why should I ? That could not blind the eyes of my imag- 
ination. She was beautiful, and that was all, and all in all, 
to me ; and had our stations been exchanged, or more than 
exchanged ; had I been King Cophetua, and she the beggar- 
maid, I should have gloried in her just as much. 

Beloved sleepless hours, which I spent in picturing that 
scene to myself, with all the brilliance of fresh recollection ! 
Beloved hours ! how soon you passed away ! Soon — soon my 
imagination began to fade ; the traces of her features on my 
mind’s eye became confused and dim ; and then came over 
me the fierce desire to see her again, that I might renew the 
freshness of that charming image. Thereon grew up an ago- 
ny of longing — an agony of weeks, and months, and years. 


Alton locke, tailor and poet. 


/3 


Where could I find that face again ? was my ruling thought 
from morning until eve. I knew that it was hopeless to look 
for her at the gallery where I had first seen her. My only 
hope was, that at some place of public resort at the West-end 
I might catch, if but for a moment, an inspiring glance of 
that radiant countenance. I lingered round the Burton Arch 
and Hyde Park Gate — but in vain. I peered into every car- 
riage, every bonnet that passed me in the thoroughfiires — in 
vain. I stood patiently at the doors of exhibitions, and con- 
certs, and playhouses, to be shoved back by policemen, and 
insulted by footmen — ^but in vain. Then I tried the fashion- 
able churches, one by one ; and sat in the free seats, to listen 
to prayers and sermons, not a word of which, alas ! 1 cared 
to understand, with my eyes searching carefully every pew 
and gallery, face by face ; always fancying, in self-torturing 
waywardness, that she might be just in the part of the gal- 
lery which I could not see. Oh ! miserable days of hope de- 
ferred, making the heart sick ! Miserable gnawing of disap- 
pointment with which I returned at nightfall, to force myself 
down to my books! Equally miserable rack of hope on which 
my nerves were stretched every morning when I rose, count- 
ing the hours till my day’s work should be over, and my mad 
search begin again ! At last “ my torment did by length of 
time become my element.” I returned steadily as ever to the 
studies which I had at first neglected, much to Mackaye’s 
wonder and disgust ; and the vain hunt after that face be- 
came a part of my daily task, to be got through with the 
same dull, sullen efibrt, with which all I did was now trans- 
acted. 

Mackaye, I suppose, at first, attributed my absences, and 
idleness to my having got into bad company. But it was 
some weeks before he gently enough told me his suspicions, 
and they were answered by a burst of tears, and a passionate 
denial, which set them at rest forever. But I had not courage 
to tell him what was the matter with me. A sacred modesty, 
as well as a sense of the impossibility of explaining my emo- 
tions, held me back. I had a half-dread, too, to confess the 
whole truth, of his ridiculing a fancy, to say the least, so ut- 
terly impracticable ; and my only confidant was a picture in 
the National Gallery, in one of the faces of which I had dis- 
covered some likeness to my Venus ; and there I used to go 
and stand at spare half hours, and feel the happier for staring 
and staring, and whispering to the dead canvas the extrava- 
gances of my idolatry. 


D 


74 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


But soon the bitter draught of disappointment b( gan to 
breed harsher thoughts in me. Those fine gentlemen who 
rode past me in the park, who rolled by in carriages, sitting 
face to face with ladies, as richly dressed, if not as beautiful, 
as she w^as — they could see her when they liked — why not 1 1 
V/hat right had their eyes to a feast denied to mine 1 They, 
too, who did not appreciate, adore that beauty as I did — for 
who could worship her like me ? At least they had not suf- 
fered for her as I had done ; they had not stood in rain and 
frost, fatigue and blank despair — watching — watching — month 
after month ; and I was making coats for them ! The 
very garment I was stitching at, might, in a day’s time, be 
in her presence — touching her dress ; and its wearer bow- 
ing, and smiling, and whispering — he had not bought that 
bliss by watching in the rain. It made me mad to think 
of it. 

I will say no more about it. That is a period of my life 
on which I can not even now look back without a shudder. 

At last, after perhaps a year or more, I summoned up cour- 
age to tell my story to Sandy Mackaye, and burst out with 
complaints more pardonable, perhaps, than reasonable. 

“ Why have I not as good a right to speak to her, to move 
in the same society in which she moves, as any of the fops 
of the day 'I Is it because these aristocrats are more intel- 
lectual than 1 1 I should not fear to measure brains against 
most of them now ; and give me the opportunities which they 
have, and I would die if I did not outstrip them. Why have 
1 not those opportunities ? Is that fault of others to be visit- 
ed on me 1 Is it because they are more refined than 1 1 
What right have they, if this said refinement be so necessary 
a qualification, a difference so deep — that without it, there is 
to be an everlasting gulf between man and man — what right 
have they to refuse to let me share in it, to give me the op- * 
portunity of acquiring it ?” 

“ Wad ye ha’ them set up a dancing academy for working 
men, wi’ ‘ manners tocht here to the lower classes!’ They’ll 
no break up their ain monopoly ; trust them for it ! Na ; if 
ye want to get amang them. I’ll tell ye the way o’t. Write 
a book o’ poems, and ca’ it ‘ A Voice fra’ the Goose, by a 
Working Tailor’ — and then — why, after a dizen years or so 
of starving scribbling for your bread, ye’ll ha’ a chance o’ find- 

•ng yoursel’ a lion, and a flunkey, and a licker o’ trenchers 

ane that jokes for his dinner, and sells his soul for a fine leddy’s 
smile — till ye presume to think they’re in earnest, and fancy 


ALTON LOCKL, TAILOR AND POET. 


75 


yoursel’ a man o’ tlie same blude as they, and fa’ in love wi’ 
one of them — and then they’ll teach you your level, and send 
ye oft to gauge whusky like Burns, or leave ye to die in a 
ditch as they did wi’ puir Thom.” 

“ Let me die, any where or any how, if I can but be near 
her — see her — ” 

“ Married to anither body ? and nursing anither body’s 
bairns ? Ah boy, boy — do ye think that was what ye were 
made for ; to please yersel’ wi’ a woman’s smiles, or e’en a 
woman’s kisses — or to please yersel’ at all ] How do ye ex- 
pect ever to be happy, or strong, or a man at a’, as long as 
ye go on looking to enjoy yersel’ — yersel’ ? I ha’ tried it. Mony 
was the year I looked for naught but my ain pleasure, and got 
it too, when it was a’ 

Sandy Mackaye, bonny Sandy Mackaye, 

There he sits singing the lang simmer’s day ; 

Lassies gae to him, 

And kiss him, and woo him — 

Na bird is sa merry as Sandy Mackaye. 

An’ muckle good cam’ o’t. Ye may fancy I’m talking like o 
sour, disappointed auld carle. But I tell ye nay. I’ve got 
that’s worth living for, though I am down-hearted at times, 
and fancy a’s wrong, and there’s na hope for us on earth, we 
be a’ sic liars — a’ liars, I think ^ ‘ a universal liars-rock sub- 
strawtum,’ as Mr. Carlyle says. I’m a great liar often mysel’, 
specially when I’m praying. Do ye think I’d live on here in 
this meeserable crankit auld bane-barrel of a body, if it was 
not for The Cause, and for the puir young fellows that come 
in to me whiles to get some book-learning about the gran’ 
auld Roman times, when folks didna care for themselves, but 
for the nation, and a man counted wife and bairns and money 
as dross and dung, in comparison with the great Roman city, 
that was the mither of them a’, and wad last on, free and 
glorious, after they and their bairns were a’ dead thegither t 
Hoot man ! If I had na T[’he Cause to care for and to work 
for, whether I ever see it triumphant on earth or no — I’d 
just tak the cauld-water-cure off Waterloo-bridge, and mak’ 
mysel’ a case for the Humane Society.” 

“ And what is The Cause ?” I asked. 

“ Wud I tell ye ? We want no ready-made freens o’ The 
Cause. I dinna hould wi’ thae French indoctrinating ped- 
ants, that took to stick free opinions into a man as ye’d stick pins 
into a pincushion, to fa’ out again the first shake. Na— -The 
Cause must find a man, and tak hauld o’ him, willy-nilly 


76 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


and grow up in him like an inspiration, till he can see nocht 
but in the light o’t. Puir bairn !” he went on, looking with 
a half-sad, half-comic face at me — “ puir bairn — like a young 
bear, wi’ a’ your sorrows before you ! This time seven years 
ye’ll ha’ no need to come speering and questioning what The 
Cause is, and the Gran’ Cause, and the Only Cause worth 
working for on the earth o’ God. And noo gang your gate, 
and mak’ fine feathers for foul birds. I’m gaun whar ye’ll 
be ganging too, before long.” 

As I went sadly out of the shop, he called me back. 

“ Stay a wee, bairn ; there's the Roman History for ye. 
There ye’ll read what The Cause is, and how they that seek 
their ain are no worthy thereof.” 

I took the book, and found in the legends of Brutus, and 
Codes, and Scsevola, and the retreat to the Mons Sacer, and 
the Gladiator’s War, what The Cause was, and forgot awhile 
in those tales of antique heroism and patriotic self-sacrifice 
my own selfish longings and sorrows. 

But, after all, the very advice which was meant to cure 
me of those selfish longings, only tended, by diverting me from 
my living outward idol, to turn my thoughts more than ever 
inward, and tempt them to feed on their own substance. 1 
passed whole days on the work-room floor in brooding silence 
— my mind peopled with an incoherent rabble of phantasms 
patched up from every object of which I had ever read. T 
could not control my day-dreams ; they swept me away with 
them over sea and land, and into the bowels of the earth. 
My soul escaped on every side from my civilized dungeon of 
brick and mortar, into the great free world from which my 
body w'as debarred. Now 1 was the Corsair in the pride of 
freedom on the dark blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy 
caverns among the bones of primseval monsters. I fought at 
the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed the 
Sultan’s elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling 
bulk. Now I was a hunter in tropic forests — I heard the 
parrots scream, and saw the humming-birds flit on from gor- 
geous flower to flower. Gradually I took a voluntary pleas- 
ure in calling up these images, and working out their details 
into words with all the accuracy and care for which my small 
knowledge gave me materials. And as the self-indulgent 
habit grew on me, I began to live two lives — one mechanical 
and outward, one inward and imaginative. The thread 
jmssed through my fingers without knowing it ; I did my 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 77 

work as a machine might do it. The dingy stifling room, the 
wan faces of my companions, the scanty meals which J 
snatched, I saw dimly, as in a dream. The tropics, and 
Greece, the imaginary battles which I fought, the phantoms 
into whose mouths I put my thoughts, were real and true to 
me. They met me when I vi^oke — they floated along beside 
me as I walked to work — they acted their fantastic dramas 
before me through the sleepless hours of night. Gradually 
certain faces among them became familiar — certain person- 
ages grew into coherence, as embodiments of those few types 
of character which had struck me the most, and played an 
analogous part in every fresh fantasia. Sandy Mackaye’s 
face figured incongruously enough as Leonidas, Brutus, a 
Pilgrim Father; and gradually, in’ spite of myself, and the 
fear with which I looked on the recurrence of that dream, 
Lillian’s figure re-entered my fairly-land. I saved her from 
a hundred dangers ; I followed her through dragon-guarded 
caverns and the corridors of magic castles ; I walked by her 
•side through the forests of the Amazon 

And now I began to crave for some means of expressing 
these fancies to myself While they were mere thoughts, 
parts of me, they were unsatisfactory, however delicious. I 
longed to put them outside me, that I might look at them 
and talk to them as permanent, independent things. First I 
tried to sketch them on the whitewashed walls of my garret, 
on scraps of paper begged from Mackaye, or picked up in the 
work-room. But from my ignorance of any rules of drawing, 
they were utterly devoid of beauty, and only excited my dis- 
gust. Besides, I had thoughts as well as objects to express 
— thoughts strange, sad, wild, about my own feelings, my 
own destiny, and drawing could not speak them for me. 

Then I turned instinctively to poetry : with its rules I was 
getting rapidly conversant. The mere desire of imitation 
urged me on, and when I tried, the grace of rhyme and metre 
covered a thousand defects. I tell my story, not as I saw it 
then, but as I see it now. A long and lonely voyage, with 
its monotonous days and sleepless nights — its sickness and 
heart-loneliness, has given me opportunities for analyzing my 
past history which were impossible then, amid the ceasele.ss 
in-rush of new images, the ceaseless ferment of their re-corn- 
bination, in which my life has passed from sixteen to twenty- 
five. The poet, I suppose, must be a seer as long as he is a 
worker, and a seer only. He has no time to philosophize — to 
“ think about thinking,” as Goethe, I have somewhere read, 


78 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

Bays that he never could do It is too often only in sickness 
and prostration and sheer despair, that the fierce voracity and 
swift digestion of his soul can cease, and give him time to 
know himself and God’s dealings with him ; and for that 
reason it is good for him, too, to have been afflicted. 

I do not M^ite all this to boast of it ; I am ready to bear 
sneers at my romance — my day-dreams — my unpractical 
habits of mind, for I know that 1 deserve them. But such 
was the appointed growth of my uneducated mind ; no more 
unhealthy a growth, if I am to believe books, than that of 
many a carefully trained one. High-horn geniuses, they tell 
me, have their idle visions as -well as we working men ; and 
Oxford has seen of late years as wild Icarias conceived as 
ever were fathered by a red Republic. For, indeed, we have 
the same flesh and blood, the same God to teach us, the same 
devil to mislead us, whether we choose to believe it or not. 
But there were excuses for me. We Londoners are not ac- 
customed from our youth to the poems of a great democratic 
genius, as the Scotchmen are to their glorious Burns. We 
have no chance of such an early acquaintance with poetic art 
as that which enabled John Bethune, one of the great unre- 
presented — the starving Scotch day-laborer, breaking stones 
upon the parish roads, to write at the age of seventeen such 
words as these : 

Hail, hallow’d evening ! saered hour to me ! 

Thy clouds of gray, thy vocal melody, 

Thy dreamy silence oft to me have brought 
A sweet exchange from toil to peaceful thought. 

Ye purple heavens! how often has my eye, 

Wearied with its long gaze on drudgery. 

Look’d up and found refreshment in the hues 
That gild thy vest with coloring profuse ! 

O, evening gray ! how’ oft have I admired 
Thy airy tapestry, w’hose radiance fired 
The glowing minstrels of the olden time. 

Until their very souls flow’-’d forth in rhyme. 

And I have listened, till my spirit grew 
Familiar with their deathless strains, and drew 
From the same source some portion of the glow 
Which fill’d their spirits, when from earth below 
They scann’d thy golden imagery. And 1 
Have consecrated thce^ bright evening sky 
My fount of inspiration : and I fling 
My spirit on thy clouds — an offering 
To the great Deity of dying day. 

Who hath transfused o’er thee his purple ray. 

« * * * 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


79 


After all, our dreams do little harm to the rich. Those 
who consider Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, 
should bless and encourage them, for the very reason for 
which we working men ought to dread them ; ibr, quickened 
into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they 
help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among 
us. Here and there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford 
jail, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures 
of classic and historic learning in a “Purgatory of Suicides 
or a Prince becomes the poet of the poor, no less for having 
fed his boyish fancy with “ The Arabian Nights” and “ The 
Pilgrim’s Progress.” But, w‘.th the most of us, sedentary and 
monotonous occupations, as has long been known, create of 
themselves a rnorbidly-meditative and fantastic turn of mind. 
And what else, in Heaven’s name, ye fine gentlemen — what 
else can a working-man do with his imagination, but dream ? 
What else will you let him do with it, oh ye education- 
pedants, who fancy that you can teach the masses as you 
would drill soldiers, every soul alike, though you will not 
bestir yourselves to do even that ? Are there no differences 
of rank — God’s rank, not man’s — among us ? You have 
discovered, since your school-boy days, the fallacy of the old 
nomenclature which civilly classed us all together as “ the 
snobs,” “ the blackguards which even — so strong is habit 
— tempted Burke himself to talk of us as “ the swinish mul- 
titude.” You are finding yourselves wrong there. A few 
more years’ experience, not in mis-educating the poor, but in 
watching the poor really educate themselves, may teach you 
that we are not all by nature dolts and idiots; that there 
are differences of brain among us, just as great as there are 
between you ; that there are those among us whose education 
ought not to end, and will not end, with the putting oil of 
the parish cap and breeches; whom it is cruelty, as well as 
folly, to toss back into the hell of mere manual drudgery, as 
soon as you have — if, indeed, you have been even so bounti- 
ful as that — excited in them a new thirst of the intellect and 
imagination. If you provide that craving with no whole- 
some food, you at least have no right to blame it if it shall 
orge itself with poison. 

Dare for once to do a strange thing, and let yourself be 
laughed at ; go to a workman’s meeting — a Chartist meet- 
ing, if you will ; and look honestly at the faces and brows 
of those so-called incendiaries, whom your venal caricaturists 
have taught you to believe a mixture of cur-dog and baboon 


80 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


— we, for our part, shall not be ashamed to show foreheads 
against your laughing House of Commons — and then say, 
Avdiat employment can those men find in the soulless routine 
of mechanical labor for the mass of brain which they almost 
universally possess ? They must either dream or agitate ; 
perhaps they are now learning how to do both to some pur* 
pose. 

But I have found, by sad experience, that there is little 
use in declamation. I had much better simply tell my story, 
and leave my readers to judge of the facts, if, indeed., they 
will be so far courteous as to believe them. 


CIIAPTEPv VIII. 

LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE. 

So I made my first attempt at poetry — need I say that my 
subject was the beautiful Lillian ? And need I say, too, that 
I was utterly disgusted at my attempt to express her in words, 
as I had been at my trial with the pencil ? It chanced also, 
that after hammering out half a-dozen verses, I met with Mr. 
Tennyson’s poems ; and the unequaled sketches of women that 
I found there, while they had, with the rest of the book, a 
new and abiding influence on my mind, were quite enough to 
show me my own fatal incompetency in that line, I threw' 
my verses away, never to resume them. Perhaps I proved 
thereby the depth of my affection. Our mightiest feelings 
are always those which remain most unspoken. The most 
intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, 
written very little personal love-poetry, w'^hile they have 
shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too 
painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person. 

But to escape from my own thoughts, I could not help 
writing something ; and to escape from my own private sor- 
rows, writing on some matter with which I had no personal 
concern. And so, after much casting about for subjects, 
Childe Harold and the old missionary records contrived to 
celebrate a spiritual wedding in my brain, of which anomalous 
marriage came a proportionately anomalous offspring. 

My hero was not to be a pirate, but a pious sea-rover, who, 
with a crew of saints, or at least uncommonly fine fellows, 
who could be very manly and jolly, and yet all be good 
Christians, of a somewhat vague and latitudinarian cast of 
doctrine (for my own was becoming rapidly so), set forth 
under the red-cross flag to colonize and convert one of my old 
paradises, a South Sea Island. 

I forget most of the lines — they w'ere probably great trash, 
but Lhugged them to my bosom as a young mother does her 
first child. 

’Twas sunset in the lone Pacific world, 

The rich gleams fading in the western sky ; 

Within the still Lagooh the sails were furled, 

The red-cross flag alone was flaunting high. 

Before them was the low and palm-fringed shore, 

Behind, the outer ocean’s baffled roar. 

D* 


82 


ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND POET. 


After which valiant plungi in medias res, came a great 
lump of description, after the manner of youths — of the 
island, and the white houses, and the banana groves, and 
above all, the single volcano towering over the whole, which 

Shaking a sinful isle with thundering shocks, 

Reproved the worshipers of stones and stocks. 

Then how a line of foam appears on the Lagoon, which is 
supposed at first to be a shoal offish, but turns out to be a troop 
of naked island beauties, swimming out to the ship. The 
decent missionaries were certainly guiltless of putting it into 
my head, whether they ever saw it or not — a great many 
things happening in the South Seas of which they find it con- 
venient to say nothing. I think I picked it up from Wallis, 
or Cook, or some other plain-spoken voyager. 

The crew gaze in pardonable admiration, but the hero, 
in a long speech, reproves them for their light-mindedness, 
reminds them of their sacred mission, and informs them that, 

The soldiers of the cross should turn their eyes 
From carnal lusts and heathen vanities; 

beyond which indisputable assertion I never got ; for this 
being about the fiftieth stanza, I stopped to take breath a 
little ; and reading and re-reading, patching and touching 
continually, grew so accustomed to my bantling’s face, that, 
like a mother, I could not tell whether it was handsome or 
hideous, sense or nonsense. I have since found out that the 
true plan, for myself at least, is to write off as much as 
possible at a time, and then lay it by and forget it for weeks 
— if I can, for months. After that, on returning to it, the 
mind regards it as something altogether strange and new, and 
can, or rather ought to judge of it as it would of the work ol 
another pen. 

But really, between conceit and disgust, fancying myself 
one day a great new poet, and the next a mere twaddler, I got 
so puzzled and anxious, that I determined to pluck up courage, 
go to Mackaye, and ask him to solve the problem for me. 

“ Hech, sirs, poetry ! I’ve been expecting it. I suppose it’s 
the appointed gate o’ a workman’s intelhictual life — that same 
lust o’ versification. Aweel, aweel — let’s hear.” 

Blushing and trembling, I read my verses aloud in as re* 
sonant and magniloquent a voice as I could command. I 
thought Mgckaye’s upper lip would never stop lengthening, 
or his lower lip protruding. He chuckled intenselv at the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


83 


imfoiTunate rhyme" between “ shocks” and “ stocks.” Indeed 
it kept him in chuckling matter for a whole month afterward ; 
but when I had got to the shoal of naked girls, he could bear 
no more, and burst out — 

“ What the deevil ! is there no harlotry and idolatry here 
in England, that ye maun gang speering after it in the Can- 
nibal Islands ? Are ye gaun to be like thae puir aristocrat 
bodies, that wad suner hear an Italian dog howl, than\n 
English nightingale sing, and winna hearken to Mr. John 
Thomas till he calls himself Giovanni Thomasino ; or do ye 
tak yoursel’ for a singing-bird, to go all your days tweedle- 
dumdeeing out into the lift, just for the lust o’ hearing your 
ain clan clatter ? Will ye be a man or a lintie ? Coral 
Islands 1 Pacific ? What do ye ken about Pacifies ? Are ye 
a cockney or a Cannibal Islander ? Dinna stand there, ye 
gowk, as fusionless as a docken, but tell me that. Where do 
ye live ?” 

“ What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye V’ asked I, with a 
doleful and disappointed visage. 

“ Mean — why, if God had meant ye to write about Pa- 
cifies, He’d ha’ put ye there — and because He means ye to 
write aboot London town He’s put ye there — and gie’n ye 
an unco sharp taste o’ the ways o’t ; and I’ll gie ye anither. 
Come along wi’ me.” 

And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time 
to put on my hat, marched me out into the streets, and away 
through Clare Market to St. Giles’s. 

It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the 
butchers’ and green-grocers’ shops the gas-lights flared and 
flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slipshod 
dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frostbit- 
ten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. 
Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy pave- 
ment, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers and 
buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and 
out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among oflal, ani- 
mal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul va- 
pors rose from cowsheds and slaughter-houses, and the door 
ways of imdrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried tht 
filth out on their shoes Irom the back-yard into the court, and 
from the court up into the main street ; while above, hanging 
like clifls over the streets — those narrow, brawling torrents ol 
filth, and poverty, and sin — the houses with their teeming 
load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking night. A 


84 ALTOxV LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

p:hastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Bel- 
gravian ! and see what London is ! and then go to the library 
which God has given thee — one often fears in vain — and see 
what science says this London might he ! 

“Ay,” he muttered to himself as he strode along, “sing 
awa’ ; get yoursel’ wi’ child wi’ pretty fancies and gran’ words, 
like the rest of the poets, and gang to hell for it.” 

“ To hell, Mr. Mackaye 

“ Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie — a warse 
ane than any fiends’ kitchen or subterranean Smithfield that 
ye’ll hear o’ in the pulpits — the hell on earth o’ being a flunky, 
and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God’s gifts on 
your ain lusts and pleasures — and kenning it — and not being 
able to get oot o’ it, for the chains o’ vanity and self-indulgence. 
I’ve warned ye. Now look there — ” 

He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable 
alley— 

“ Look ! there’s not a soul down that yard hut’s either beg- 
gar, drunkard, thief, or warse. Write aboot that ! Say how 
ye saw the mouth o’ hell, and the twa pillars thereof at the 
entry — the pawn-broker’s shop o’ one side and the gin palace at 
the other — twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and women, 
and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o’ the monsters, 
how they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and 
anither. Write aboot that.” 

“ What jaws, Mr. Mackaye !” 

“ Thae faulding-doors o’ the gin-shop, goose. Are na they 
a mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red-hot statue 
o’ Moloch, or wicked Gogmagog, wherein the auld Britons 
burnt their prisoners 'i Look at thae barefooted, bare-backed 
hizzies, with their arms round the men’s necks, and their 
mouth’s full o’ vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irish- 
woman pouring the gin down the babbie’s throat ! Look at 
that raft' o’ a boy gaun out o’ the pawnshop, where he’s been 
pledging the handkerchief he stole the morning, into the gin- 
shop, to buy beer poisoned wi’ grains o’ paradise, and cocculus 
indicus, and saut, and a’ damnable, maddening, thirst-breed- 
ing, lust-breeding drugs ! Look at that girl that went in wi’ 
a shawl on her back, and came out wi’out ane ! Drunkards 
frae the breast ! harlots frae the cradle ! damned before they’re 
born ! John Calvin had an inkling o’ the truth there, I’m 
a’most driven to think, wi’ his reprobation deevil’s doctrines !” 

“ Well — but — Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these 
poor creatures.” 


85 


ALT9N LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

“ Th«.«n ye ought. What do ye ken ahoot the Pacific ? 
Which is maist to your business ? That bare-backed hizzies 
that play the harlot o’ the other side o’ the warld, or these — 
these thousands o’ barebacked hizzies that play the harlot o’ 
your ain side — made out o’ your ain flesh and blude 1 You a 
poet ! True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at 
harne. If ye’ll be a poet at a’, ye maun be a cockney poet ; 
and while the cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like 
Jeremiah of old, o’ lamentation, and mourning, and woe, for 
the sins o’ your people. Gin ye want to learn the spirit o’ a 
people’s poet, down wi’ your Bible and read the auld Hebrew 
prophets ; gin ye wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morn- 
ing till night ; and gin ye’d learn the matter, just gang after 
your nose, and keep your eyes open, and ye’ll no miss it.” 

“But all this is so — so unpoetical.” 

“ Hech ! Is there no the heeven above them there, and 
the hell beneath them ? And God frowning and the deevil 
grinning? No poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the 
classic tragedy defined to be, man conquered by circum- 
stance? Ganna ye see it there? And the verra idea of 
the modern tragedy, man conquering circumstance ? and I’ll 
show ye that, too — in mony a garret where no eye hut the 
gude God’s enters, to see the patience, and the fortitude, and 
the self-sacrifice, and the luve stronger than death, that’s shin- 
ing in thae dark places o’ the earth. Come wi’ me, and see,” 

We went on through a back street or two, and then into a 
huge, miserable house, w^hich, a hundred years ago, perhapS; 
had wftnessed the luxury, and rung to the laughter of some 
one great fashionable family alone there in their glory. Now 
every room of it held its family, or its group of families — a 
phalanstery of all the fiends ; its grand staircase, with the 
carved ballustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, 
converted into a common sewer for all its inmates. - Up stair 
after stair we went, while wails of children, and curses of men, 
steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of air from every door 
way, till, at the topmost story, we knocked at a garret door. 
We entered. Bare it was of furniture, comfortless, and 
freezing cold ; but, with the exception of the plaster dropping 
from the roof, and the broken windows patched with rags and 
paper, there was a scrupulous neatness about the whole, which 
contrasted strangely with the filth and slovenliness outside. 
There was no bed in the room — no table. On a broken 
chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying 
that she was warming her hands over embers which had long 


85 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


been cold, shaking her head, and muttering to herself with 
palsi(id lips about the guardians and the workhouse ; while 
upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox-mark- 
ed, hollow-eyed, emaciated, her only bed-clothes the skirt of a 
large handsome new riding habit, at which two other girls, 
wan and tawdry, were stitching busily, as they sat right and 
left of hei on the floor. The old woman took no notice of us 
as we entered ; but one of the girls looked^p, and with a 
pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips, 
and whispered, “ Ellen’s asleep.” 

“ I’m not asleep, dears,” answered a faint, unearthly voice ; 
“ I was only praying. Is that Mr. Mackaye ?” 

“Ay, my lasses; iDut ha’ ye gotten na fire the nicht V’ 

“No,” said one of them, bitterly, “ we’ve earned no fire to- 
night, by fair trade, or foul either.” 

The sick girl tried to raise herself up and speak, but was 
stopped by a frightful fit of coughing and expectoration, as 
painful, apparently, to the sufferer as it was, I confess, dis- 
gusting even to me. 

I saw Mackaye slip something into the hand of one of the 
girls, and whisper, “ A half-hundred of coals to which she 
replied with an eager look of gratitude that I never can for- 
get, and hurried out. Then the sufferer, as if taking advantage 
of her absence, began to speak quickly and eagerly. 

“ Oh, Mr. Mackaye — dear, kind Mr. Mackaye — do speak 
to her ; and do speak to poor Lizzy here ! I’m not afraid to 
say it before her, because she’s more gentle like, and hasn’t 
learnt to say bad words yet — but do speak to them, and tell 
them not to go the bad way, like all the rest. Tell them 
it’ll never prosper. I know it is want that drives them to it, 
as it drives all of us — but tell them it’s best to starve and die 
honest girls, than to go about with the shame and the curse 
of God on their hearts, for the sake of keeping this poor, 
miserable, vile body together a few short years more in this 
world o’ sorrow. Do tell them, Mr. Mackaye.” 

“ I’m thinking,” said he, with the tears running down his 
old, withered face, “ ye’ll mak a better preacher at that text 
than I shall, Ellen.” 

“Oh, no, no ; who am I, to speak to them? — it’s no merit 
o’ mine, Mr. Mackaye, that the Lord’s kept me pure through 
it all. I should have been just as bad as any of them, if the 
Lord had not kept me out of temptation in His great mercy, 
by making me the poor, ill-favored creature I am. From 
that time I was burnt when I was a child, and had the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


87 


sinall-pox afterward, oli ! how sinful I was, a'nd repined and 
rebelled against the Lord ! And now I see it was all His 
blessed mercy to keep me out of evil, pure and unspotted for 
my dear Jesus, when he comes to take me to himself. I saw 
Him last night, ^Ir. Mackaye, as plain as I see you now, all 
in a flame of beautiful white fire, smiling at me so sweetly ; 
and He showed me the wounds in His hands and His feet, 
and He said, “ Ellen, my own child, those that suffer with 
me here, they shall be glorified with me hereafter, for I’m 
coming very soon to take you home.” 

Sandy shook his head at all this with a strange expression 
of- face, as if he sympathized and yet disagreed, respected and 
yet smiled at the shape which her religious ideas had as 
sumed ; and I remarked in the mean time that the poor girl’s- 
neck and arm were all scarred and distorted, apparently from 
the effects of a burn. 

“ Ah,” said Sandy, at length, “ I tauld ye ye were the 
better preacher of the two ; ye’ve mair comfort to gie Sandy 
than he has to gie the like o’ ye. But how is the wound in 
your back the day ?” 

Oh, it was wonderfully better ! the doctor had come and 
given her such blessed ease with a great thick leather he had 
put under it, and then she did not feel the boards through so 
much. “ But oh, Mr. Mackaye, I’m so afraid it will make 
me live longer to keep me away iiom my dear Saviour. And 
there’s one thing, too, that’s breaking my heart, and makes 
me long to die this very minute, even if I didn’t go to Heaven 
at all, Mr. Mackaye.” (And she burst out crying, and be- 
tween her sobs it came out, as well as I could gather, that 
her notion w^as, that her illness was the cause of keeping the 
girls in “ the bad icay^^ as she called it.) “ For Lizzy here, I 
did hope that she had repented of it after all my talking to her ; 
but since I’ve been so bad, and the girls have had to keep me 
most o’ the time, she’s gone out of nights just as bad as ever.” 

Lizzy had hid her face in her hands the greater part of this 
speech. Now she looked up passionately, almost fiercely — 

“ Repent — I have repented — I repent of it every hour — I 
hate myself, and hate all the world because of it ; but I must 
— I must ; I can not see her starve, and I can not starve 
myself. When she first fell sick she kept on as long as she 
could, doing what she could, and then between us w'e only 
earned three shillings a week, and there was ever so much to 
take off for fire, and twopence for thread, and fivepence for 
candles ; and th^'n we were always getting fined, because 


88 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


they never gave iis out the work till too late on purpose, and 
then they lowered prices again ; and now Ellen can’t work 
at all, and there’s four of us with the old lady, to keep off 
two’s work that couldn’t keep themselves alone.” 

“ Doesn’t the parish allow the old lady any thing I ven- 
tured to ask. 

“ They used to allow half-a-crown for a bit ; and the doc- 
tor ordered Ellen things from the parish, hut it isn’t half of 
’em she ever got ; and when the meat came, it was half 
times not fit to eat, and when it was her stomach turned 
against it. If she was a lady she’d he cockered up with all 
sorts of soups and jellies, and nice things, just the minute she 
fancied ’em, and lie on a water bed instead of the bare floor — 
and so she ought ; but where’s the parish ’ll do that ? And 
the hospital wouldn’t take her in because she was incurable ; 
and, besides, the old ’un w'ouldn’t let her go — nor into the 
union neither. When she’s in a good-humor like, she’ll sit 
by her by the hour, holding her hand and kissing of it, and 
nursing of it, for all the world like a doll. But she wont 
hear of the workhouse ; so now, these last three weeks, they 
takes off all her pay, because they says she must go into the 
house, and not kill her daughter by keeping her out — as if 
they warn’t a killing her themselves.” 

“ No workhouse — no workhouse !” said the old woman, 
turning round suddenly, in a clear, lofty voice. “ No work- 
house, sir, for an officer’s daughter.” 

And she relapsed into her stupor. 

At that moment the other girl entered with the coals — 
but without staying to light the fire, ran up to Ellen with 
some trumpery dainty she had bought, and tried to persuade 
her to eat it. 

“We have been telling Mr. Mackaye every thing,” said 
poor Lizzy. 

“A pleasant story, isn’t it? Oh I if that fine lady, as 
we’re making that riding-habit for, would just spare only 
half the money that goes in dressing her up to ride in the 
park, to send us out to the colonies, wouldn’t I be an honest 
girl there ? Maybe an honest man’s wife ! Oh ! my God ! 
wouldn’t I slave my fingers to the bone for him ! Wouldn’t 
I mend my life then ! I couldn’t help it — it would be like 
getting into heaven out of hell. But now — we must — we 
must — I tell you. I shall go mad soon, I think, or take tc 
drink. When I passed the gin-shop down there just now, I 
had to run like mad for fear I should go in — and if I oner 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


took to that — Now then to work again. Make up the fire, 
Mrs. , please do.” 

And she sat down and began stitching frantically at the 
riding-habit, from which the other girl had hardly lifted her 
hands or eyes for a moment during our visit. * 

We made a motion as if to go. 

“God bless you,” said Ellen ; “ come again soon, dear Mr. 
Mackaye.” 

“Good-by,” said the elder girl! “and good night to you. 
Night and day’s all the same here — we must have this home 
by seven o’clock to-morrow morning. My lady’s going to 
ride early they say, whoever she may be, and we must just 
sit up all night. It’s often we haven’t had our clothes off for 
a week together, from four in the morning till two the next 
morning sometimes — stitch, stitch, stitch. Somebody’s wrote 
a song about that — I’ll learn to sing it — it ’ll sound fitting- 
like, up here.” 

“ Better sing hymns,” said Ellen. 

“ Hymns for ?” answered the other, and then burst 

out into that peculiar wild, ringing, fiendish laugh — has my 
reader never heard it ? 

I pulled out the two or three shillings which I possessed, and 
tried to make the girls take them, for the sake of poor Ellen. 

“ No ; you’re a working-man, and we won’t feed on you — 
you’ll want it some day — all the trade’s going the same way 
as we, as fast as ever it can !” 

Sandy and I went down the stairs. 

“ Poetic element ? Yon lassie, rejoicing in her disfigure- 
ment and not her beauty, like the nuns of Peterborough in 
auld time — is their no poetry there ? That puir lassie, dying 
on the bare boards and seeing her Saviour in her dreams, is 
there na poetry there, callant ? That auld body owTe the 
fire, wi’ her ‘ an officer’s dochter,’ is there na poetry there ? 
That ither, prostituting hersel to buy food for her freen — is 
there na poetry there ? — tragedy. 

With hues as when some mighty painter dips 
His pen in dyes of earthquake and eclipse. 

Ay, Shelley’s gran’; always gran’; but Fact is grander — ■ 
God and Satan are grander. All around ye, in every gin- 
shop and costermonger’s cellar, are God and Satan at death 
grips ; every garret is a haill Paradise Lost or Paradise 
Regained : and will ye think it beneath ye to be the ‘ Peo- 
ple’s Poet ?’ ” 


CHAPTER IX. 
POETRY AND POETS. 


In the history of individuals, as well as in that ol iiatioiia, 
there is often a period of sudden blossoming — a short luxuriant 
summer, not without its tornados and thunder-glooms, in 
which all the buried seeds of past observation leap forth 
together into life, and form, and beauty. And such with 
me were the two years that followed. I thought — I talked 
poetry to myself all day long. I wrote nightly on my return 
from work. I am astonished, on looking back, at the variety 
and quantity of my productions during that short time. My 
subjects were intentionally and professedly cockney ones. I 
had taken Mackaye at his word. I had made up my mind, 
that if I had any poetic power, I must do my duty therewith 
in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call me, 
and look at every thing simply and faithfully as a London 
artisan. To this, I suppose, is to be attributed the little 
geniality and originality for which the public have kindly 
praised my verses ; a geniality which sprung, not from the 
atmosphere whence I drew, but from the honesty and single- 
mindedness with which, I hope, I labored. Not from the 
atmosphere, indeed — that was ungenial enough ; crime and 
poverty, all-devouring competition, and hopeless struggles 
against Mammon and Moloch, amid the roar of wheels, the 
ceaseless stream of pale, hard faces, intent on gain, or brood- 
ing over woe ; amid endless prison-walls of brick, beneath a 
lurid, crushing sky of smoke and mist. It was a dark, noisy, 
thunderous element, that London life ; a troubled sea that 
can not rest, casting up mire and dirt ; resonant of the clank- 
ing of chains, the grinding of remorseless machinery, the wail 
of lost spirits from the pit. And it did its work upon me ; it 
gave a gloomy coloring, a glare as of some Dantean “ Inferno,” 
to all my utterances. It did not excite me, or make me 
fierce — I was too much inured to it — but it crushed and sad- 
dened me ; it deepened in me that peculiar melancholy of 
intellectual youth, which Mr. Carlyle has christened forever 
by one of his immortal nicknames, “ Werterism I battened 
on my own melancholy. I believed, I love to believe, that 
every face I passed bore the traces of discontent a.'i deep as 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


91 


was my own — and was I so far wrong? Was I so far wron 
either in the gloomy tone of my own" poetry ? Should not 
London poet’s work just now be to cry, like the Jew of old, 
about the walls of Jerusalem, “ Woe, woe to this city !” Is 
this a time to listen to the voices of singing men and sinking 
women ? or to cry, “ Oh ! that my head were a fountairi of 
tears, that I might weep for the sins of my people ?” Is it 
not noteworthy, also, that it is in this vein that the London 
poets have always been the greatest ? Which of poor Hood’s 
lyrics have an equal chance of immortality with “ The Song 
of the Shirt” and “ The Bridge of Sighs,” rising, as they do, 
right out of the depths of that Inferno, sublime from their 
very simplicity ? Which of Charles Mackay’s lyrics can 
compare lor a moment with the Eschylean grandeur, the ter- 
rible rhythmic lilt of his “ Cholera Chaunt,” 

Dense on the stream the vapors lay, 

Thick as wool on the cold highway ; 

Spungy and dim each lonely lamp, 

Shone o’er the streets so dull and damp ; 

' The moonbeams could not pierce the cloud 
That swathed the city like a shroud ; 

There stood three shapes on the bridge alone, 

Three figures by the coping-stone j 
Gaunt and tall and undefined. 

Spectres built of mist and wind. 

* * * # 

I see his foot-marks east and west — 

I hear his tread in the silence fall — 

He shall not sleep, he shall not rest — 

He comes to aid us one and all. 

Were men as wise as men might be. 

They would not work for you, for me, 

For him that cometh over the sea; 

But they will not hear the warning voice : 

The Cholera comes — Rejoice ! rejoice ! 

He shall be lord of the swarming town ! 

And mow them down, and mow them down ! 

* * * * 

Not that I neglected, on the other hand, every means of ex- 
tending the wanderings of my spirit into sunnier and more 
verdant pathways. If I had to tell the gay ones above of 
the gloom around me, I had also to go forth into the sunshine 
to bring home if it were but a wild-flower garland to those 
that sit in darkness and the shadow of death. That was all 
that I could offer them. The reader shall judge, when he 
has read this book throughout, whether I did not at last find 
for them something better than even all the beauties of nature 


!J5 


92 ALTON LOCKE, TAtLOR AND POET. 

But it was on canvas, and not among realities, that I had 
to choose my garlands; and therefore the picture galleries 
became more than ever, my favorite — haunt, I was going to 
say ; but, alas ! it was not six times a year that I got access 
to them. Still, when once every May I found myself, by 
dint of a hard-saved shilling, actually within the walls of that 
to me enchanted palace, the Royal Academy Exhibition— 
Oh, ye rich ! who gaze round you at will upon your prints and 
pictures, if hunger is, as they say, -a better sauce than any 
Ude invents, and fasting itself may become the handmaid of 
luxury, you should spend, as I did perforce, weeks and months 
shut out from every glimpse of Nature, if you would taste 
her beauties, even on canvas, with perfect relish and childish 
self-abandonment. Hoav I loved and blest those painters ! 
how I thanked Creswick for every transparent, shade-check- 
ered pool ; Fielding, for every rain-clad down ; Cooper, for 
every knot of quiet cattle beneath the cool, gray willows; 
Stanfield, for every snowy peak, and sheet of foam-fringed 
sapphire — each and every one of them a leaf out of the magic 
book which else was ever closed to me. Again, I say, how I 
loved and blest those painters ! On the other hand, I was 
not neglecting to read as well as to write poetry ; and, to 
speak first of the highest, I know no book, always excepting 
Milton, which at once so quickened and exalted my poetical 
view of man and his history, as that great prose poem, the 
single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle’s “ French Rev- 
olution.” Of the general effect which his w'orks had on me, 
I shall say nothing ; it was the same as they have had, thank 
God, on thousands of my class and of every other. But that 
book above all first recalled me to the overwhelming and yet 
ennobling knowledge that there was such a thing as Duty ; 
first taught me to see in history not the mere farce-tragedy of 
man’s crimes and follies, but the dealings of a righteous Ruler 
of the universe, whose ways are in the great deep, and whom 
the sins and errors, as well as the virtues and discoveries ot 
man, must obey and justify. 

Then, in a happy day, I fell on Alfred Tennyson’s poetry, 
and found there, astonished and delighted, the embodiment of 
thoughts about the earth around me which I had concealed, 
because I fancied them peculiar to myself Why is it that 
the latest poet has generally the greatest influence over the 
minds of the young ? Surely not for the mere charm of nov- 
elty ? The reason is, that he, living amid the same hopes, 
the same temptations, the same sphere of observation as they, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. • 93 

gives utterance and outward form to the very questions which, 
vague and wordless, have been exercising their hearts. And 
what endeared Tennyson especially to me, the working-man. 
was, as I afterward discovered, the altogether democratic ten- 
dency of his poems. True, all great poets are by their office 
democrats ; seers of man only as man ; singers of the joys, the 
sorrows, the aspirations common to all humanity ; hut in Al- 
fred Tennyson there is an element especially democratic, truly 
leveling; not his political opinions, about which 1 know noth- 
ing, and care less, but his handling of the trivia], every-day 
sights and sounds of nature. Brought up, as 1 understand, in a 
part of England which possesses not much of the picturesque, 
and nothing of that which the vulgar call sublime, he has 
learnt to see that in all nature, in the hedgerow and the sand- 
bank, as well as in the Alp peak and the ocean waste, is a 
world of true sublimity, a minute infinite — an ever-fertile gar- 
den of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathom- 
able and the eternal, as truly as any phenomenon which as 
tonishes and awes the eye. The descriptions of the desolate 
pools and creeks where the dying swan floated, the hint of the 
silvery marsh mosses by Mariana’s moat, came to me like 
revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful, 
wonderful, sublime in those flowery dykes of Battersea-fields ; 
in the long gravelly sweeps of that lone tidal shore ; and here 
was a man who had put them into words for me ! This is 
what I call democratic art — the revelation of the poetry which 
lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in 
that direction : in Landseer and his dogs — in Fielding and 
his downs, with a host of noble fellow;artists — and in all 
authors who have really seized the nation’s mind, from Crabbe 
and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great 
tide sets ever onward, outward, toward that which is common 
to the many, not that which is exclusive to the few — toward 
the likeness of Him who causes His rain to fall on the just 
and on the unjust, and His sun to shine on the evil and the 
good ; who knoweth the cattle upon a thousand hills, and all 
the beasts of the field are in His sight. 

'Well — I must return to my story. And here some one 
may ask me, “But did you not find this true spiritual de- 
mocracy, this universal knowledge and sympathy, in Shaks- 
peare above all other poets ?” It may be my shame to have 
to confess it ; but though I find it now, I did not then. I do 
not think, however my case is singular: from what I can 
ascertain, there is even with regularly educated minds a 


94 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


period of life at which that great writer is not appreciated, 
just on account of his very greatness; on account of the deep 
and large experience which the true understanding of his plays 
requires — experience of man, of history, of art, and above all 
of those sorrows wdiereby, as Hezekiah says, and as I have 
learnt almost too well — “w'hereby men live, and in all which 
is the life of the spirit.” At seventeen, indeed, I had devour- 
ed Shakspeare, though merely for the food to my fancy which 
his plots and incidents supplied, for the gorgeous coloring of 
his scenery ; but at the period of which I am now writing, I 
had exhausted that source of mere pleasure ; I was craving 
lor more explicit and dogmatic teaching than any which he 
seemed to supply ; and lor three years, strange as it may ap- 
pear, I hardly ever looked into his pages. Under what circum- 
stances I afterward recurred to his exhaustless treasures, my 
readers shall in due time he told. 

So I worked away manfully wdth such tools and stock as 
I possessed, and of course produced, at first, like all young 
M'riters, some sufficiently servile imitations of my favorite poets. 

“Ugh !” said Sandy, “wha wants mongrels atween Burns 
and Tennyson 'I A gude stock baith, but gin ye’d cross the 
breed ye maun unite the spirits, and no the manners, o’ the 
men. Why maun ilk a one the noo steal his neebor’s barna- 
cles before he glints out o’ windows 1 Mak’ a style for yoursel’, 
laddie ; ye’re na mair Scots hind than yc are Lincolnshire 
laird ; sae gang yer ain gate’ and leave them to gang theirs ; 
and just mak a gran’, brode, simple S^xori style for yoursel’.” 

“But how can I, till I know what sort of a style it ought 
to be ?” 

“O! but yon’s amazing like Tom Sheridan’s answer to his 
father. ‘ Tom,’ says the auld man, ‘ I’m thinking ye maun 
tak a wife.’ ‘ Verra weel, father,’ says the puir skellum ; 

‘ and wha’s wife shall I tak ?’ Wha’s style shall I tak 'I say 
all the callants the noo. Mak’ a style as ye would mak’ a 
wife, by marrying her a’ to yoursel’ ; and ye’ll nae mair ken 
what’s your style till it’s made, than ye’ll ken what your 
wile’s like till she’s been mony a year by your ingle.” 

“My dear Mackaye,” I said, “you have the most unmer- 
ciful way of raising difficulties, and then leaving poor fellows 
to lay the ghost for themselves.” 

“ Hech, then, I’m a’thegither a negative teacher, as they 
ca’ it in the new lallans. I’ll gang out o’ my gate to tell a 
man his kye are laired, but I’m no obligated thereby to pu’ 
them out tor him. After a’, nae man is rid o’ a difficulty till 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


95 


he’s conquered it single-handed for himsel’ : besides, I’m nac 
poet, mair’s the gude hap for you.” 

“ Why, then ?” 

“ Och, och ! they’re puir, feckless, crabbit, unpractical 
todies, thae poets : but if it’s your doom, ye maun dree it ; 
and I’m sair afeared ye ha’ gotten the disease o’ genius, 
mair’s the pity, and maun write, I suppose, willy-nilly. Some 
folks’ hooels are that made o’ catgut, that they canna stir 
without chirruping and screeking.” 

However, ceUro 'percitm, I wrote on ; and in about two 
years and a half had got together “ Songs of the Highways ” 
enough to fill a small octavo volume, the circumstances of 
whose birth shall be given hereafter. Whether I ever at- 
tained to any thing like an original style, readers must judge 
for themselves — the readers of the said volume, I mean, for I 
have inserted none of those poems in this my autobiography ; 
first, because it seems too like puffing my own works ; and 
next, because I do not want to injure the as yet not over 
great sale of the same. But, if any one’s curiosity is so far 
excited that he wishes to see what I have accomplished, the 
best advice which I can give him is, to go .forth and buy all 
the working-men's poetry which has appeared during the last 
twenty years, without favor or exception ; among which he 
must needs, of course, find mine, and also, I am happy to say, 
a great deal which is much better and more instructive than 
mine. 


CHAPTER X. 


HOW FOLKS TURN CHARTISTS. 

Those who read my story only for amusement, I advise 
to skip this chapter. Those, on the other hand, who really 
wish to ascertain what working-men actually do suffer — to see 
whether their political discontent has not its roots, not merely 
in fanciful ambition, but in misery and slavery most real and 
agonizing — those in whose eyes the accounts of a system, or 
rather barbaric absence of all system, which involves starva- 
tion, nakedness, prostitution, and long imprisonment in dun- 
geons worse than the cells of the Inquisition, will be invested . 
with something at least of tragic interest, may, I hope, think 
it worth their while to learn how the clothes which they 
wear are made, and listen to a few occasional statistics, which 
though they may seem to the wealthy mere lists of dull fig- 
ures, are to the workmen symbols of terrible physical realities 
— of hunger, degradation, and despair.* 

Well : one day our employer died. He had been one of 
the old sort of fashionable West-end tailors in the fast decreas- 
ing honorable trade ; keeping a modest shop, hardly to be dis- 
tinguished from a dwelling-house, except by his name on the 
window-blinds. He paid good prices for worl., though net 
as good, of course, as he had given twenty years before, and 
prided himself upon having all his work done at home. His 
work-rooms, as I have said, were no elysiums ; but still, as 
good, alas ! as those of three tailors out of four. He was 
proud, luxurious, foppish ; but he was honest and kindly 
enough, and did many a generous thing by men who had 
been long in his employ. At all events, his journeymen 
could live on what he paid them. 

But his son, succeeding to the business, determined, like 
Rehoboam of old, to go ahead with the times. Fired with 
the great spirit of the nineteenth century — at least with that 
one which is vulgarly considered its especial glory — he resolved 
to make haste to be rich. His father had made money very 

* Facts still worse than those which Mr. Locke’s story contains have 
been made public by the Morning Chronicle in a series of noble letters 
on “Labor and the Poor;” which we entreat all Christian people to 
“read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” “That will be better fci 
them ;” as Mahomet, in similar cases, used to say. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET- 97 

slowly of late ; while dozens, who had begun business Jong 
after him, had now retired to luxurious ease and suburban 
villas. Why should he remain in the minority ? W^hy 
should he not get rich as fast as he could 1 Why should he 
stick to the old, slow-going, honorable trade ? Out of some 
450 West-end tailors, there were not one hundred left who 
were old-fashioned and stupid enough to go on keeping down 
their own profits by having all their work done at home and 
at first-hand. Ridiculous scruples ! Tiie government knew 
none such. Were not the army clothes, the post-office clothes, 
the policemen’s clothes, furnished by contractors and sweaters, 
who hired the work at low prices, and let it out again to 
journeyman at still lower ones ? Why should he pay his 
men two shillings where the government paid them one ? 
Were there not cheap houses even at the West-end, which 
had saved several thousands a year merely by reducing their 
workmen’s wages 1 And if the Workmen chose to take lower 
wages, he was not bound actually to make them a present of 
more than they asked for ! They would go to the cheapest 
market for any thing they wanted, and so must he. Besides, 
wages had really been quite exorbitant. Half his men threw 
each of them as much money away in gin and beer yearly,' 
as would pay two workmen at a cheap house. W^hy was he 
to be robbing his family of comforts to pay for their extrava- 
gance 1 And charging his customers, too, unnecessarily high 
prices — it was really robbing the public ! 

Such, I suppo.se, were some of the arguments which led to 
an official announcement, one Saturday night, that our young 
employer intended to enlarge his establishment, for the purpose 
of commencing business in the “ show trade and that, em- 
ulous of Messrs. Aaron, Levi, and the rest of that class, mag- 
nificent alterations were to take place in the premises, to make 
room for which our work-rooms were to be demolished, and 
that for that reason — for of course it was only for that reason 
— all work would in future be given out, to be made up at 
the men’s own homes. 

Our employer’s arguments, if they were such as I suppose, 
were reasonable enough according to the present code of corn 
rnercial morality. But strange to say, the auditory, insensible 
to the delight with which the public would view the splendid 
architectural improvements — with taste too groveling to ap- 
preciate the glories of plate-glass shop fronts an(i brass scroll 
^ork — too selfish to rejoice, lor its own sake, in the beauty of 
arabesques and chandeliers, which though they never might 


98 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


behold, the astonished public would — with souls too niggardly 
to leap for joy at the thought that gents would henceforth buy 
the registered guanaco vest, and the patent elastic ornni-seas 
onum paletot half-a-crown cheaper than ever — or that needy 
nobleman would pay three pound-ten, instead of five pounds, 
for their footmen’s liveries — received the news, clod-heartcd 
as they were, in sullen silence, and actually, when they got 
into the street, broke out into murmurs, perhaps into execra- 
tions. 

“ Silence I” said Crossthwaite ; “ walls have ears. Come 
down to the nearest house of call, and talk it out like men. 
instead of grumbling in the street, like fish-fags.” 

So down we went. Crossthwaite, taking my arm, strode 
on in moody silence — once muttering to himselt bitterly, 

“ Oh, yes ; • all right and natural ! What can the little 
sharks do but follow the bi^ opes ?” 

We took a room, and Crossthwaite coolly saw us all in ; and 
locking the door, stood with his back against it. 

“Now then, mind, ‘One and all,’ as the Cornishmen say, 
and no peaching. If any man is scoundrel enough to carry 
tales. I’ll—” 

“ Do what P’ asked Jemmy Downes, who had settled him- 
self on the table -with a pipe and a pot of porter. “ You 
arn’t the King of the Cannibal Islands, as I know of, to cut 
a cove’s head off'?” 

“ No ; but if a poor man’s prayer can bring God’s curse 
down upon a traitor’s head — it may stay on his rascally 
shoulders till it rots.” 

“ If if’s and an’s were pots and pans. — Look at Shechem 
Isaacs, that sold penknives in the street six months ago, now 
a-riding in his own carriage, all along of turning sweater. If 
God’s curse is like that — I’ll be happy to take any man’s 
share of it.” 

Some new idea seemed twinkling in the fellow’s cunning 
bloated face as he spoke. I, and others also, shuddered at 
his words ; but we all forgot them a moment afterward, as 
Crossthwaite began to speak. 

“ We were all bound to expect this. Every working tailoi 
must come to this at last, on the present system ; and we are 
only lucky in having been spared so long. You all know 
where this will end — in the same misery as fifteen thousand 
out of twenty thousand of our class are enduring now. We 
shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, 
middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our 



ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


99 


starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever de- 
creasing prices of labor, ever increasing profits made out of that 
labor by the contractors who will employ us — arbitrary lines, 
inflicted at the caprice of hirelings — the competition of women, 
and children, and starving Irish — our hours of work will in- 
crease one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; 
and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improve- 
ment in wages, but ever more penury, slavery, misery, as we 
are pressed on by those who are sucked .by fifties — almost by 
hundreds — yearly, out of the honorable trade in which we 
were brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, 
which is devouring our trade and many others, body and soul. 
Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help us — 
our children must labor from the cradle, without chance of 
going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of Heaven, 
our boys, as they grow up must turn beggars or paupers — oui 
daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earn- 
ings by prostitution. And, after all, a whole family will not 
gain what one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. 
You know there will be no hope for us. There is no use 
appealing to government or parliament. I don’t want to 
talk politics here. I shall keep them for another place. Bui 
you can recollect as well as I can, when a deputation of ui 
went up to a member of parliament — one that was reputed a 
philosopher, and a political economist, and a liberal — and set 
before him the ever-increasing penury and misery of our trade 
and of those connected with it ; you recollect his answer — 
that, however glad he would be to help us, it was impossible 
— he could not alter the laws of nature — that wages were 
regulated by the amount of competition among the men them- 
selves, and that it was no business of government, or any one 
else, to interfere in contracts between the employer and em- 
ployed, that those things regulated themselves by the laws of 
political economy, which it was madness and suicide to op- 
pose. He may have been a wise man. I only know that he 
was a rich one. Every one speaks well of the bridge which 
carries him over. Every one fancies the laws which fill his 
pockets to be God’s laws. But I say this : If neither gov- 
ernment nor members of parliament can help us, we must 
help ourselves. Help yourselves, and Heaven will help you. 
Combination among'ourselves is the only chance. One thing 
we can do — sit still.” 

“ And starve 1” said some one. 

“ Yes, and starve ! Better starve than sin. I say, it is o 


100 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND I’OET. 


fein tc give in to this system. It is a sin to add our weight 
to the crowd of artisans who are now choking and strang- 
ling each other to death, as the prisoners did in the black hole 
of Calcutta. Let those who will, turn beasts of prey, and 
feed upon their fellows ; but let us at least keep ourselves 
pure. It may be the law of political civilization, the law of 
nature, that the rich should eat up the poor, and the poor eat 
up each other. Then I here rise up and curse that law, that 
civilization, that nature. Either I will destroy them, or they 
shall destroy me. As a 'slave, as an increased burden on my 
fellow-suflerers, I will not live. So help me God ! I will 
take no work home to my house ; and I call upon every one 
here to combine, and to sign a protest to that effect.” 

“ What’s the use of that, my good Mr. Crossthwaite in- 
terrupted some one querulously. “ Don’t you know what 
come of the strike a few years ago, when this piece-work and 
sweating first came in ? The masters made fine promises, 
and never kept ’em ; and the men who stood out had their 
places filled up with poor devils who were glad enough to 
take the work at any price — -just as ours will be. There’s 
no use kicking against the pricks. All the rest have come to 
it, and so must we. We must live somehow, and half a 
leaf is better than no bread ; and even that half-loaf will go 
into other men’s mouths, if we don’t snap it at once. Besides, 
we can’t force others to strike. We may strike and starve 
ourselves, but what’s the use of a dozen striking out of twenty 
thousand 

“ Will you sign the protest, gentlemen, or not ?” asked 
Crossthwaite, in a determined voice. 

Some half-dozen said they would, if the others would. 

“ And the others won’t. Well, after all, one man must 
take the responsibility, and I am that man. I will sign the 
protest by myself. . I will sweep a crossing — I will turn cress- 
gatherer, rag-picker; I will starve piecemeal, and see, my 
wife starve with me ; but do the wrong thing I will not' 
The Cause wants martyrs. If I must be one, I must.” 

All this while my mind had been undergoing a strange 
perturbation The notion of escaping that infernal work- 
room and the company I met there — of taking my w'ork 
home, and thereby, as I hoped, gaining more time for study 
— at least, having my books on the spot ready at every odd 
moment, was most enticing. I had hailed the proposed change 
as a blessing to me, till I heard Crossthwaite’s arguments : 
not that I had not known the facts before, but it had never 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


101 


struck me till then that it M^as a real sin against my class to 
make myself a party in the system by which they were allow- 
ing themselves (under temptation enough, God knows), to bo 
enslaved. But now I looked with horror on the gulf of pen- 
ury before me, into the vortex of which not only I, but rny 
whole trade, seemed irresistibly sucked. I thought with 
shame and remorse of the lew shillings which I had earned 
at various times by taking piece-work home, to buy my can- 
dles for study. I whispered my doubts to Crosstbwaite, as 
he sat, pale and determined, watching the excited and queru- 
lous discussions among the other workmen. 

“ What ? So you expect to have time to read ? Study, 
after sixteen hours a day stitching ? Study, M'hen you can 
not earn money enough to keep you from wasting and shrink- 
ing away day by day ? Study with your heart full of shame 
and indignation, fresh from daily insult and injustice ? Study, 
with the black cloud of despair and penury in front of you ? 
Little time, or heart, or strength, will you have to study, 
when you are making the same coats you make now, at half 
the price.” 

I put my name down beneath Crossthwaite’s on the paper 
which he handed me, and went out with him. 

“Ay,” he muttered to himself, “be slaves — what you are 
worthy to be, that you will be ! You dare not combine — you 
dare not starve — you dare not die — and therefore you dare not 
be free ! Oh ! lor six hundred men like Barbaroux’s Marseil- 
lois — ‘ who knew how to die !’ ” 

“ Surely, Crossthw'aite, if matters were properly represented 
to the government, they would not, for their own existence 
sake, to put conscience out of the question, allow such a 
system to continue growing.” 

“ Government — government ? Y'ou a tailor, and not know 
that government are the very authors of this system ? Not 
to know that they first set the example, by getting the army 
and navy clothes made by contractors, and taking the lowest 
tenders ? Not to know that the police clothes, the postmen’s 
clothes, the convicts’ clothes, are all contracted for on the 
same infernal plan, by sweaters, and sweater’s sweaters, and 
sweater’s sweater’s sweaters, till government work is just the 
very last, lowest resource to which a poor starved-out wretch, 
betakes himself to keep body and soul together ? Why, the 
government prices, in almost every department, are half, and 
less than half, the very lowest living price. I tell you, the 
careless iniquity of government about these things will come 


102 ALTON' LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

out some day. It will be known, the whole abomination, 
and future generations will class it with the tyrannies of the 
Roman emperors and the Norman barons. Why, it’^s a fact, 
that the colonels of the regiments — noblemen, most of them 
— make their own vile profit out of us tailors — out of the 
pauperism of the men, the slavery of the children, the prosti- 
tution of the women. They get so much a uniform allowed 
them by government to clothe the men with ; .and then — then, 
they let out the jobs to the contractors at less than half what 
government give them, and pocket the’ difference. And then 
you talk of appealing to government !” 

“ Upon.my word,” I said, bitterly, “we tailors seem to owe 
the army a double grudge. They not only keep under other 
artisans, but they help to starve us first, and then shoot us, 
if we complain too loudly.” 

“ Oh, ho ! your blood’s getting up, is it ? Then you’re in 
the humor to be told what you have been hankering to know 
so long — where Mackaye and I go at night. We’ll strike 
while the iron’s hot, and go down to the Chartist meeting 
at 

“ Pardon me, my dear fellow,” I said, “ I can not bear the 
thought of being mixed up in conspiracy — perhaps, in revolt 
and bloodshed. Not that I am afraid. Heaven knows, I am 
not. But I am too much harassed^ miserable, already. I see 
too much wretchedness around me, to lend my aid in increas- 
ing the sum of suffering, by a single atom, among rich and 
poor, even by righteous vengeance.” 

“ Conspiracy ? Bloodshed ? What has that to do with 
the Charter? It suits the venal Mammonite press well 
enough to jumble them together, and cry ‘Murder, rape, and 
robbery,’ whenever the six points are mentioned ; but they 
know, and any man of common sense ought to know, that 
the Charter is just as much an open political question as the 
Reform Bill, and ten times as much as Magna Charta was, 
when it got passed. What have the six points, right or wrong, 
to do with the question whether they can be obtained by 
moral force, and the pressure of opinion alone, or require what 
we call ulterior measures to get them carried ? Come along !” 

So with him I went that night. 

“ Well, Alton ! where was the treason and murder ? Your 
nose must have been a sharp one, to smell out any there. 
Did you hear any thing that astonished your weak mind so 
very exceedingly, after all ?” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


103 


“ The only thing that did astonish me, was to hear men ot 
my own class — and lower still, perhaps, some of them — speak 
with such fluency and eloquence. Such a fund of information 
— such excellent English — where did they get it all ?” 

“ From the God w'ho knows nothing about ranks. They’re 
the unknown great, the unaccredited heroes, as Master Thomas 
Carlyle would say, whom the flunkies aloft have not ac- 
knowledged yet — though they’ll be forced to, some day, with 
a vengeance. Are you convinced, once for all ?” 

I really do not understand political questions, Crossth- 
waite.” 

“ Does it want so very much wisdom to understand the 
rights and the wrongs of all that ? Are the people represent- 
ed ? Are you represented ? Do you feel like a man that’s 
got any one to fight your battle in parliament, my young 
friend, eh?” 

“ I’m sure I don’t know — ” 

“ Why, what in the name of common sense — what interest 
or feeling of yours or mine, or any man’s you ever spoke to, 

except the shopkeeper, do Alderman A or Lord C 

D represent ? They represent property — and we have 

none. They represent rank — we have none. Vested inter- 
ests — we have none. Large capitals — those are just what 
crush us. Irresponsibility of employers, slavery of the em- 
ployed, competition among masters, competition among work- 
men, that is the system they represent — they preach it — they 
glory in it. Why, it is the very ogre that is eating us all up. 
They are chosen by the few, they represent the few, and they 
make laws for the many — and yet you don’t know whether 
or not the people arc represented I” 

We were passing by the .door of*the Victoria Theatre ; it 
was just half-price time — and the beggary and rascality of 
London were pouring in to their low amusement, from the 
neighboring gin palaces and thieves’ cellars. A herd of rag- 
ged boys, vomiting forth slang, filth, and blasphemy, pushed 
past us, compelling us to take good care of our pockets. 

“ Look there ! look at the amusements, the training, the 
civilization, which the government permits to the children of 
the people ! These licensed pits of darkness, traps of tempta- 
tion, profligacy, and ruin, triumphantly yawning night after 
night — and then tell me that the people who see their chil- 
dren thus kidnapped into hell, are represented by a govern- 
ment who licenses such things !” 

“ Wouli a change in the franchise cure that V 


104 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


•‘Household suffrage mightn’t — but give us the Charter, 
and we’ll see about it ! Give us the Charter, and we’ll send 
workmen into parliament that shall soon find out whether 
something better can’t be put in the way of the ten thousand 
boys and girls in London who live by theft and prostitution, 
than the tender mercies of the Victoria — a pretty name ! 
They say the Queen’s a good woman — and I don’t doubt it. 
I yvonder often if she knows what her precious namesake here 
is like 

“ But, really, I can not see how a mere change in repre- 
sentation can cure such things as that.” 

“Why, didn’t they tell us, before the Reform Bill, that ex- 
tension of the suffrage was to cure every thing ? And how 
can you have too much of a good thing ? We’ve only taken 
them at their word, we Chartists. Haven’t all politicians 
been preaching for years that England’s national greatness 
was all owing to her political institutions — to Magna Charta, 
and the Bill of Rights, and representative parliaments, and 
all that? It was but the other day I got hold of some Tory 
paper, that talked about the English constitution, and the 
balance of queen, lords, and commons, as the ‘ Talismanic 
Palladium’ of the country. ’Gad, we’ll see if a move onward 
in the same line won’t better the matter. If the balance of 
classes is such a blessed thing, the sooner we get the balance 
equal, the better ; for its rather lopsided just now, no one 
cap deny. So, representative institutions are the talismanic 
}}alladium of the nation, are they ? The palladium of the 
classes that have them, I dare say ; and that’s the very best 
reason why the classes that haven’t got ’em should look out 
for the same palladium for themselves. What’s sauce for 
the gander is sauce for tlTe goose,- isn’t it ? We’ll try — we’ll 
see whether the talisman they talk of has lost its power all 
of a sudden sin'ce ’32 — -whether we can’t rub the magic ring 
a little for ourselves, and call up genii to help us out of the 
mire, as the shopkeepers and the gentlemen have done.” 

From that night I was a Chartist, heart and soul — and so 
were a million and a half more of the best artisans in En- 
gland — at least, I bad no reason to be ashamed of my com- 
pany. Yes ; I too, like Crossthwaite, took the upper classes 
at their word ; bowed down to the idol of political institutions, 
and pinned my hopes of salvation on ‘ the possession of one 
tenthousandth part of a talker in the national palaver.' 
True, I desired the Charter, at first (as I do, indeed, at this 


ALTO.N LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


^ 105 


moment), as a means to glorious ends — not only because it 
would give a chance of elevation, a -free sphere of action, to 
lowly worth and talent ; but because it was the path to 
reforms — social, legal,* sanitary, educational — to which the 
veriest Tory — certainly not the great and good Lord Ashley 
—would not object. But soon, with me, and I am afraid 
with many, many more, the means became, by the frailty of 
poor human nature, an end, an idol in itself. I had so made 
up my mind that it was the only method of getting what I 
wanted, that I neglected, alas ! but too often, to try the 
methods which lay already by me. “If we had but the 
Charter” — was the excuse for a thousand lazinesses, procras- 
tinations. “ If we had but the Charter” — I should be good, 
and free, and happy. Fool that I was ! It was within, 
rather than without, that I needed reform. 

And so I began to look on man (and too many of us, I am 
afraid, are doing so) as the creature and puppet of circum- 
stances — of the particular outward system, social or political, 
in Vhich he happens to find himself. An abominable heresy, 
no doubt; but, somehow, it appears to me just* the same as 
Benthamites, and economists, and high-churchmen, too, for 
that matter, have been preaching for the last twenty years 
with great applause from their respective parties. One set 
informs the world that it is to be regenerated by cheap bread, 
free trade, and that peculiar form of the “ freedom of indus- 
try” which, in plain language, signifies “ the despofism of 
capital ;” and which, whatever it means, is merely some out- 
ward system, circumstance, or “ dodge,” about man, and not 
in him. Another party’s nostrum is more churches, more 
schools, more clergymen — excellent things in their way — ^bet- 
ter even than cheap bread, or free trade, provided only that 
they are excellent — that the churches, schools, clergymen, 
are good ones. But the party of whom I am speaking seem 
to us workmen to consider tho quality quite a secondary con- 
sideration, compared with the quantity. They expect the 
world to be regenerated, not by becoming more a Church — 
none would gladlier help them in bringing that about than 
the Chartists themselves, paradoxical as it may seem — but 
by being dosed somewhat more with a certain “ Church sys- 
tem,” circumstance, or “ dodge.” For my part, I seem to 
have learnt that the only thing to regenerate the world is not 
more of any system, good or bad, but simply more of the 
Spirit of God. * 

About the .supposed omnipotence of the Charter I have 


IOC 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


found out my mistake. I believe no more in “ Morison's- 
Pill-remedies,” as Thomas Carlyle calls them. Talismans 
are worthless. The age of spirit-compelling spells, whether of 
parchment or carbuncle, is past — if, indeed, it ever existed. 
The Charter will no more make men good, than political 
economy, or the observance of the Church Calendar — a fact 
which ^^e working-men, L really believe, have, under the 
pressure of wholesome defeat and God-sent affliction, found 
out sooner than our more “ enlightened” fellow-idolaters. 
But, at that time, as I have confessed already, we took 
our betters at their word, and believed in Morison’s Pills. 
Only, as we looked at the world from among a cla.ss of facts 
somewhat diflerent from theirs, we differed from them pro- 
portionably as to our notions of the proper ingredients in the 
said Pill. 

But what became of our protest. 

It was received — and disregarded. As for turning us off', 
we had, de facto, like Coriolanus banished the Iloma'ns, 
turned our master off'. All the other hands, some forty in 
number, submitted and took the yoke upon them, and went 
down into the house of bondage, knowing wdiither they went. 
Every man of them is now a beggar, compared with what 
he was then. Many are dead m the prime of life of con- 
sumption, bad food and lodging, and the peculiar diseases of 
our trJffe. Some have not been heard of lately — we fancy 
‘them imprisoned in. some sweaters’ dens — but thereby hangs a 
tale, whereof more hereafter. 

But it was singular, that every one of the six who had 
merely professed their conditional readiness to sign the protest, 
v/ere contumeliously discharged the next day, without any 
reason being assigned. It was evident that there had been 
a traitor at the meeting ; and every one suspected Jemmy 
Downes, especially as he fell into the new system with sus- 
piciously strange alacrity. But it was as impossible to prove 
the off’ense against him as to punish him for it. Of that 
wretched man, too, and his subsequent career, I shall have 
somewhat to say hereafter. Veriiy, there is a God who 
judgeth the earth ! 

But now behold me and my now intimate and beloved 
friend, Crossthwaite, with nothing to do — a gentlemanlike 
occupation ; but, unfortunately, in our class, involving starv- 
aticm. ‘What was to be done? We applied for work at 
several “ honorable shops but at all we received the same 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


107 


answer. Their trade was decreasing — the public ran daily 
more and more to the cheap show shops — and they themselves 
were forced, in order to compete with these latter, to put 
more and more of their work out at contract prices. Facilis 
descensus Averni ! Having once been hustled out of the 
serried crowd of competing workmen, it was impossible to 
force our way in again. So, a week or ten days past, our 
little stocks of money were exhausted. 1 was downhearted 
t once ; but Crossthwaite bore up gayly enough. 

“ Katie and I can pick a crust together without snarling 
over it. And, thank God, I have no children, and never in- 
tend to have, if I can keep true to myself, till the good times 
come.” 

“Oh ! Crossthwaite, are not children a blessing ?” 

“ Would they be a blessing to me now ? No, my lad. 
Let those bring slaves into the world who will ! I will never 
beget children to swell the numbers of those who are tram- 
pling each other down in the struggle for daily bread, to 
minister in ever deepening poverty and misery to the rich 
man’s luxury — perhaps his lust.” 

“ Then you believe in the Malthusian doctrines?” 

“ I believe them to be an infernal lie, Alton Locke ; though 
good and wise people like Miss Martineau may sometimes 
be deluded into preaching them. I believe there’s room on 
English soil for twice the number there is now ; and when 
we get the Charter well prove it ; we’ll show that God 
meant living human heads and hands to be blessings and not 
curses, tools and not burdens. But in such times as these, 
let those who have wives be as though they had none — as 
St. Paul said, w'hen he told his people under the Roman em- 
peror to be above begetting slaves and martyrs. A man of 
the people should keep himself as free from incumbrances 
as he can just now. He will find it all the more easy to 
dare and suffer for the people, when their turn comes — ” 

And he set his teeth firmly, almost savagely. 

“I think I can earn a few shillings, now and then, by 
waiting for a paper I know of If that won’t do, I must take 
up agitating for a trade, and live by .spouting, as many a 
Tory member as well as Radical ones do. A man may do 
worse, for ho may do nothing. At all events, my only chance 
now is to help on the Charter; for the sooner it comes the 
better for me. And if I die — why the little woman won’t be 
long in coming after me, I know that well ; and there s a 
tough business got well over for both of us ! ’ 


108 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Hech,” said 'Sandy, 

“ To every man 
Death eomes but onee a li(‘e — 

as my countryman, Mr. Macaulay says, in lhae gran Roman 
ballants o’ his. But for ye, Alton, laddie, ye’re owre young 
to start off in the People’s Church Meeiitant, sae just bide 
wi’ me, and the barrel o’ meal in the corner there winna 
waste, nae mair than it did wi’ the widow o’ Zareptha ; a 
tale which coincides sae weel wi’ the everlasting righteous- 
nesses, that I’m at times no inclined to consider it a’thegither 
mythical.” 

But I, with thankfulness which vented itself through my 
eyes, finding my lips alone too narrow for it, refused to eat 
tire bread of idleness. 

“ A weel, then, ye’ll just mind the shop, and dust books 
whiles ; I’m getting auld and stiff, and ha’ need o’ help i’ the 
business.” 

“ No,” I said ; “ you say so out of kindness; but if you can 
afford no greater comforts than these, you can not afford to 
keep me in addition to yourself.” 

“ Hech, then ! How do ye ken that the auld Scot eats a’ 
he makes'? I was na born the spending side o’ Tweed, my 
man. But gin ye dauer, why dinna ye pack up your duds, 
and the poems wi’ them, and gang till your cousin i’ the uni- 
versity ? he’ll surely put you in the way o’ publishing them. 
He’s bound to it by blude ; and there’s na shame in asking 
him to help you toward reaping the fruits o’ your ain labors. 
A few punds on a bond for repayment when the edition was 
sauld, noo, I’d do that for mysef ; but I’m thinking ye’d 
better try to get a list o’ subscribers. Dinna mind your in- 
dependence ; it’s but spoiling the Egyptians, ye ken ; and 
thae bit ballants will be their money’s worth, 1*11 warrant, 
and tell them a wheen facts they’re no that well acquentit 
wi’. Hech? Johnnie, my Chartist?” 

“ Why not go to my uncle ?” 

“ Puir sugar-and-spice-selling baillie bodie ! is there aught 
in his ledger about poetry, and the incommensurable value o’ 
the products o’ genius ? Gang till the young scholar : ’he’s a 
canny one, too, and he’ll ken it to be worth his while to fash 
himsel’ a wee anent it.” 

So I packed up my little bundle, and lay awake all that 
night in a fever of expectation about the as yet unknown 
world of green fields and woods throug'n which my road to 
Cambridge lay. 


CHAPTER XI. 

“THE YARD WHERE THE GENTLEMEN LIVE.” 

I MAY be forgiven, surely, if I run somewhat into detail 
about this my first visit to the country. 

I had, as I have said before,* literally never been farther a- 
lield than Fulham or Battersea Rise. One Sunday evening, 
indeed, I had got as far as Wandsworth Common ; but it was 
March, and, to my extreme disappointment, the heath was 
not in flower. 

But, usually, my Sundays had been spent enti^;ely in study ; . 
which to me was rest, so worn out were both my body and 
my mind with the incessant drudgery of my trade, and the 
slender fare to which I restricted myself. Since I had lodged 
with Mackaye, certainly, my food had been better. I had 
not required to stint my appetite for money wherewith to buy 
candles, ink, and pens. My wages, too, had increased with 
my years, and altogether I found myself gaining in strength, 
though I had no notion how much I possessed till I set ‘forth 
on this walk to Cambridge. 

It w’-as a glorious morning at the end of May ; and when 
I escaped from the pall of smoke which hung over the city, I 
found the sky a sheet of cloudless blue. How I watched for 
the ending of the rows of houses, which lined the road for 
miles — the great roots of London, running far out into the 
country, up which poured past me an endless stream of food, 
and merchandise, and human beings — the sap of the huge 
metropolitan life-tree ! How each turn of the road opened a 
fresh line of terraces or villas, till hope deferred made the heart 
sick, and the country seemed — like the place where the rain- 
bow touches the ground, or the El Dorado of Raleigh’s Guiana 
settlers — always a little farther oft'! How, between gaps in 
the houses, right and left. I caught tantalizing glimpses of 
green fields, shut from me by dull lines of high-spiked palings ! 
How I peeped through gates and over fences at trim lawns 
and gardens, and longed to stay, and admire, and speculate 
on the names of the strange plants and gaudy flowers ; and 
then hurried on, always expecting to find something still finer 
ahead — something really worth stopping to look at — till the 
houses thickened again into a street, and I found myself, to 
my disappointment, in the midst ql‘ a town ' And then more 


110 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


villas and palings ; and then a village ; when M^ould they stop, 
those endless houses ? 

At last they did stop. Gradually the people whom I pass 
cd began to look more and more rural, and more toil-worn 
and ill-fed. The houses ended, cattle yards and farm build- 
ings appeared ; and, right and left, far away, spread the low 
rolling sheet of green meadows and corn fields. Oh, the joy ; 
The lawns with their high elms and firs, the green hedge- 
rows, the delicate hue and s<ient of the fresh clover fields, 
the steep clay banks where I stopped to pick nosegays of wild 
flowers, and became again a child, and then recollected my 
mother, and a walk' with her on the river bank toward the 
Pi.ed House. 1 hurried on again, but could not be unhappy, 
, while my eyes ranged free, for the first time in my life, over 
the checkered squares of cultivation, over glittering brooks, 
and hills quivering in the green haze, while above hung the 
skylarks, pouring out their souls in melody. And then, as the 
sun grew hot, and the larks dropped one by one into the grow- 
ing corn, the new delight of the blessed silence ! I listened to 
the stillness ; for noise had been my native element ; I had 
become in London quite unconscious of the ceaseless roar of 
the human sea, casting up mire and dirt. And now, for the 
first time in my life, the crushing, confusing hubbub had flowed 
away, and left my brain calm and free. How I felt at that 
moment a capability of clear, bright meditation, which was as 
new to me, as I believe it would have been to most London- 
ers in my position. I can not help fancying that our unnatu- 
ral atmosphere of e^tcitement, physical as well as moral, is to 
blame for very much of the working-men’s restlessness and 
fierceness. As it was, I felt that every step forward, every 
breath of fresh air, gave me new life! I had gone fifteen 
miles before I recollected that, for the first time for many 
months, I had not coughed since I rose. 

So on I went, down the broad, bright road, which seemed to 
beckon me forward into the unknown expanses of human life. 

The world was all before me, where to choose, 

and I saw it both with my eyes and my imagination, in the 
temper of a boy broke loose from school. My heart kept 
holiday. I loved and blessed the birds which flitted past me, 
and the cows which lay dreaming on thp sward. I recollect 
stopping with delight at a picturesque descent into the road, 
to watch a nursery garden, full of roses of every shade, from 
brilliant yellow to darkest purple ; and as T wondered at tin 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Ill 


innumerable variety of beauties Avliich man’s art had deveb 
oped from a few poor and Avild species, it seemed to me the 
most delightful life on earth, to follow in such a place the 
pririiEDval trade of gardener Adam; to study the secrets of 
the flower world, the laws of soil and climate ; to create new 
species, and gloat over the living fruit of one’s own science 
and perseverance. And then I recollected the tailor’s shop, 
and the Charter, and the starvation, and the oppression, which 
[ had left behind, and ashamed of my own selfishness, went 
hurrying on again. 

At last I came to a wood — the first real wood that I had 
ever seen ; not a mere party of stately park trees growing out 
of smooth turf, but a real wild copse ; tangled branches and 
gray stems fallen across each other ; deep, ragged underwoods 
of shrubs, and great ferns like princes’ feathers, and gay beds 
of flowers, blue and pink and yellow, with butterflies flitting 
about them, and trailers that climbed and dangled from bough 
to bough — a poor commonplace bit of copse, I daresay, in the 
Avorld’s eyes, but to me a fairy wilderness of beautiful forms, 
mysterious gleams and shadows, teeming with manifold life. 
As I stood looking wistfully over the gate, alternately at the 
inviting vista of the green embroidered path, and then at the 
grim notice over my head, “All trespassers prosecuted,” a 
young man came up the ride, dressed in veiveteen jacket and 
leather gaiters, sufficiently bedrabbled with mud. A fishing- 
rod and basket bespoke him some sort of destroyer, and I saw 
in a moment that he was “a gentleman.” After all, there 
is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men 
whose class no dirt or rags could hide, any more than they 
could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among work- 
men, too; but, on the whole, the gentlemen — by whom I do 
not mean just now the rich — have the superiority in that 
point. But not, please God, forever. Give us the same air, 
water, exercise, education, good society, and you Avill see 
whether this “haggardness,” this “coarseness,” &c., &c., for 
the list is too long to specify, be an accident, or a property, ol 
the man of the people. 

“ May I go into your Avood ?” asked I at a venture, curios- 
ity conquering pride. 

“ Well ! what do you want there, my good fellow ?” 

“ To see what a wood is like — I never was in one in my 
life.” 

“ Hamph ! well — you may go in for that, and welcome. 
Never was in a wood in his life ! poor devil !” 


112 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

Thank you quoth I. And I slowly clambered over 
the gate. He put his hand carelessly on the top rail, vaulted 
over it like a deer, and then turned to stare at me. 

“ Hullo ! I say — I forgot — don’t go far in, or ramble up 
and down, or you’ll disturb the pheasants.” 

I thanked him again for what license he had given me — went 
in, and lay down by the path-side. 

Here, I suppose, by the rules of modern art, a picturesque 
description of the said wood should follow ; but I am the most 
incompetent person in the world to write it. And, indeed, 
the whole scene was so novel to me, that I had no time to 
analyze ; I could only enjoy. I recollect lying on my face and 
fingering over the delicately cut leaves of the weeds, and won- 
dering whether the people who lived in the country thought 
them as wonderful and beautiful as I did; and then I recol- 
lected the thousands w’^hom I had left behind, who, like me, 
had never seen the green face of God’s earth ; and the answer 
of the poor gamin in St. Giles’s, who, when he was asked 
what the country was, answered, '‘'■the yard lohere the gentle- 
men live ivhen they go out of toivnf significant that, and 
pathetic ; then I wondered whether the time w'ould ever come 
when society would be far enough advanced to open to even 
such as he a glimpse, if it were only once a year, of the fresh 
clean face of God4 earth ; and theil I became aware of a soft 
mysterious hum, above me and around me, and turned on my 
back to look whence it proceeded, and saw the leaves, gold — 
green and transparent in the sunlight, quivering against the 
deep heights of the empyrean blue; and, hanging in the sun- 
beams that pierced the foliage, a thousand insects, like specks 
of fire, that poised themselves motionless on thrilling wdngs, 
and darted away, and returned to hang motionless again; and 
I wondered what they eat, and whether they thought about 
any thing, and whether they enjoyed the sunlight ; and then 
that brought back to me the times when 1 used to lie dream- 
ing in my crib on summer mornings, and watched the flies 
dancing reels between me and the ceiling; and that again 
brought the thought of Susan and my mother ; and I prayed 
for them — not sadly — I could not be sad there ; and prayed 
that w'e might all meet again some day and live happily to- 
gether; perhaps in the country, where 1 could write poems in 
peace; and then, by degrees, my sentences and thoughts grew 
incoherent, and in happy, stupid animal comfort, I faded away 
into a heavy sleep, which lasted an hour or more, till I w'as 
awakened by the eflbrts of certain enterprising great black 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 113 

and red ants, who were trying to found a small Algeria in 
rny left ear. 

I rose and left the wood, and a gate or two on, stopped 
again to look at the same sportsman fishing in a clear silver 
brook. I could not help admiring with a sort of childish won- 
der the graceful and practiced aim wdth which he directed his ' 
tiny bait, and called up mysterious dimples on the surface, 
which in a moment increased to splashings and strugglings 
of a great fish, compelled, as if by some invisible spell, to fol- 
low the point of the bending rod till he lay panting on the 
bank. * I confess, in spite of all my class prejudices against 
“ garhe-preserving aristocrats,” I almost envied the man ; at 
least I seemed to understand a little of the universally attract- 
ive charms which those same outwardly contemptible field 
sports possess ; the fresh air, fresh fields and copses, fresh run- 
ning brooks, the exercise, the simple freedom, the excitement 
just sufficient to keep alive expectation and banish thought. 
After all, his trout produced much the same mood in him as 
my turnpike road did in me. And perhaps the man did not 
go fishing or shooting every day. The laws prevented him 
from shooting at least all the year round ; so sometimes there 
might be something in which he made himself of use. An 
honest, jolly face too he had — not without thought and 
strength in it. “ Well, it is a strange world,” said I to my- 
self, “where those who can, need not; and those who can not 
must !” 

Then he came close to the gate, and I left it just in time 
to see a little group arrive at it — a woman of his own rank, 
young, pretty, and simply dressed, with a little boy,' decked 
out as a Highlander, on a shaggy Shetland pony, which his 
mother, as I guessed her to be, was leading. And then they 
all met, and the little fellow held up a basket of provisions to 
his father, who kissed him across the gate, and hung his creel 
of fish behind the saddle, and patted the mother’s shoulder, 
as she looked up lovingly and laughingly in his face. Alto- 
gether, a joyous, genial bit of Nature 1 Yes, Nature. 

Shall I grudge simple happiness to the few, because it is as 
yet, alas ! impossible for the many ? 

And yet the whole scene contrasted so painfully wdth me 
— with my past, my future, my dreams, my wrongs, that I 
could not look at it ; and with a swelling heart I moved on 
— all the faster because I saw' they were looking at me and 
talking of me, and the fair wife threw after me a wistful, 
pitying glance, which I was afraid might develop itself into 


114 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Bome ofTer of food or money — a thing which I scorned and 
dreaded, because it involved the trouble of a refusal. 

Then, as I walked on once more, my heart smote me. If 
they had wished to be kind, why had I grudged them the 
opportunity of a good deed ? At all events, I might have 
asked their advice. In a natural and harmonious state, when 
society really means brotherhood, a man could go up to any 
stranger, to give and receive, if not succor, yet still experience 
and wisdom : and was I not bound to tell them what I knew ? 
was sure that they did not know? Was I not bound to 
preach the cause of my class wherever I went ? Here were 
Idndly people who, for aught I knew, would do right the 
moment they were told where it was wanted ; if there was 
an accursed artificial gulf between their class and mine, had 
I any right to complain of it, as long as I helped to keep it 
up by my false pride and surly reserve? No! I would speak 
my mind henceforth — I would testify of what I saw and 
knew of the wrongs, if not of the rights, of the artisan, before 
whomsoever I might come. Oh ! valiant conclusion of half 
an hour’s self-tormenting scruples 1 How I kept it, remains 
to be shown. 

I really fear that I am getting somewhat trivial and pro- 
lix ; but there was hardly an Incident in my two days’ tramp 
which did not give me some small fresh insight into the terra 
incognita of the country ; and there may be those among my 
readers, to whom it is not uninteresting to look, for once, at 
even the smallest objects with a cockney workman’s eyes. 

Well, I trudged on — and the shadows lengthened, and I 
grew footsore and tired ; but every step was new, and won 
me forward with fresh excitements for my curiosity. 

At one village I met a crowd of little, noisy, happy boys 
and girls pouring out of a smart new Gothic school-house. ] 
could not resist the temptation of snatching a glance througl 
the open door. I saw on the walls maps, music charts, and 
pictures. How I envied 'those little urchins! A solemn 
sturdy elder, in a white cravat, evidently the parson of the 
parish, was patting children’s heads, taking down names, and 
laying down the law to a shrewd, prim young schoolmaster. 

Presently, as I went up the village, the clergyman strode 
past me, brandishing a thick stick and humming a chant, 
and joined a motherly-looking wife, who, basket on arm, was 
popping in and out of the cottages, looking alternately serious 
and funny, cross and kindly — I suppose, according to the say- 
ings and doings of the folks within. 


ALTON LOCKE TAILOR AND POET. 


115 


“ Come,” I thought; ‘Hhis looks like work at least.” And 
as I went out of the village, I accosted a laborer, who was 
trudging my way, fork on shoulder, and asked him if that 
was the parson and his wife ] 

I was surprised at the difficulty with which I got into con- 
versation with the man ; at his stupidity, feigned or real, I 
could not tell which; at the dogged, suspicious reserve with 
which he eyed me, and asked me whether I was “ one of 
thae parts?” and whether I was a Londoner, and what I 
wanted on the tramp, and so on, before he seemed to think it 
safe to answer a single question. He seemed, like almost 
every laborer I ever met, to have something on his mind ; to 
live in a state of perpetual fear and concealment. When, 
however, he found I was both a cockney and a passer-by, he 
began to grow more communicative, and told me, “ Ees — 
that were the parson, sure enough.” 

“ And what sort of man was. he ?” 

“ Oh ! he was a main kind man to the poor ; leastwise in 
the matter of visiting ’em, and praying with ’em, and getting 
’em to put into clubs, and such like ; and his lady too. Not 
that there was any fault to find with the man about money 
— but ’twasn’t to be expected of him.” 

“ Why, was he not rich ?” 

Oh, rich enough to the likes of us. But his own tithes 
here ai n’t more than a thirty pounds, we hears tell ; and if 
he’d hadn’t summat of his own, he couldn’t do not nothing 
by the poor ; as it be, he pays for that ere school all to his 
own pocket, next part. All the rest o’ the tithes goes to 
some great lord or other — they say he draws a matter of a 
thousand a year out of the parish, and not a foot ever he sot 
into it ; and that’s the way with a main lot o’ parishes, up 
and down.” 

This was quite a new fact to me. “ And what sort of 
'iblks were the parsons all round?” 

“ Oh, some of all sorts, good and bad. About six and a 
half-a-dozen. There’s two or three nice young gentlemen 
corne’d round here now, but they’re all what’s-’em-a-call-it ? 

. — some sort o’ papishes ; — leastwise, they has prayers in the 
church every day, and doesn’t preach the Gospel, no how, I 
hears by my wife, and she knows all about it, along of going 
to meeting. Then there’s one over thereaway, as had to 
leave his living — he knows why. He got safe over seas. If 

he had been a poor man, he’d a been in jail, safe enough, 

and soon enough. Then there’s two or three as goes a-hunt- 


)16 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


ing — not as I sees no harm in that ; if^a man’s got plenty of 
money, he ought to enjoy liirnself, in course : but still he can’t 
be here and there too, to once. Then there’s two or three as 
is bad in their healths, or thinks themselves so — or else has 
livings summer’ else ; and they lives summer’ or others, and 
has curates. Main busy chaps is thae curates, always, and 
wonderful hands to preach ; but then, just as they gets a little 
knowing like at it, and folks gets to like ’em, and run to hear 
’em, od' they pops to summat better; and in course they'’ re 
right to do so ; and so we country folks get nought but the 
young colts, afore they’re broke, you see.” 

“ And what sort of a preacher was his parson ?” 

“ Oh, he preached very good Gospel. Not that he went 
very often hisself, acause he couldn’t make out the meaning 
of it ; he preached too high, like. But his wife said it was 
uncommon good Gospel ; and surely when he come to visit a 
body, and talked plain English, like, not sermon-ways, he 
was a very pleasant pian to heer, and his lady uncommon 
kind to nurse folk. They sot up with me and my wife, they 
two did, two whole nights, when we was in the fever, afore 
the officer could get us a nurse.” 

“Well,” said I, “there are some good parsons left.” 

“ Oh, yes; there’s some very good ones — each one after his 
own M^ay ; and there’d be more on ’em, if they did but know 
how bad we Inborers w'as off. Why bless ye, I mind when 
they was very different. A new parson is a mighty change 
for the better, most wise, we finds. Why, when I was a boy, 
we never had no schooling. And now mine goes and learns 
singing and jobrafy, and ciphering, and sich like. Not that I 
sees no good in it. We was a sight better off in the old times, 
when there weren’t no schooling. Schooling harn’t made 
wages rise, nor preaching neither.” 

“ But surely,” I said, “ all this religious knowledge ought 
to give comfort, even if you are badly off.” 

“ Oh ! religion’s all very well for them as has time for it , 
and a very good thing — we ought all to mind our latter end. 
But 1 don’t see how a man can hear sermons with an empty 
belly ; and there’s so much -to fret a man, now, and he’s so 
cruel tired coming home o’ nights, he can’t nowise go to pray 
a lot, as gentlefolks does.” 

“ But are you so ill off?” 

“ Oh ! he’d had a good harvesting enough ; but then he 
owed all that for he’s rent ; and he’s club-money wasn’t paid 
up, nor he’s shop. And then, with he’s wages — ” (I forget 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


117 


the sum — under ten shillings), “ how could a man keep his 
mouth full, when he had five children? And then, folks is 
so unmarciful — I’ll just tell you what they says to me, now, 
last time I was over at the board — ” 

And thereon he rambled off into a long jumble of medical- 
' officers, and relieving officers, and Farmer This, and Squire 
That, which indicated a mind as ill-educated as discontented. 
He cursed, or rather grumbled at — for he had not spirit, it 
seemed, to curse any thing — the New Poor Law ; because it 
“ ate up the poor, flesh and bone — bemoaned the “ Old . 
Law,” when “ the vestry was forced to give a man what- 
somdever he axed for, and if they didn’t he’d go to the magis- 
trates and make ’em, and so sure as a man got a fresh child 
he went and got another loaf allowed him next vestry, like a 
Christian — and so turned through a gate, and set to work 
forking up some weeds on a fallow, Jeaving me many new 
thoughts to digest. 

That night, I got to some town or other, and there found a 
night’s lodging, good enough for a walking traveler. 


CHAPTER XII. 
CAMBRIDGE. 


When I started again next morning, I found myself so stifi 
and footsore, that I could hardly put one leg before the other, 
much less walk upright. I was really quite in despair, beforo 
the end of the first mile ; for I had no money to pay lor a lift 
on the coach, and I knew, besides, that they would not Jxj 
passing that way for several hours to come. So, with aching 
back and knees, I made shift to limp along, bent almost double, 
and ended by siting down for a couple of hours, and looking 
about me, in a country which would have seemed dreary 
enough, I suppose, to atiy one but a freshly-liberated captive, 
such as I was. At last I got up and limped on, stiller than 
ever from my rest, when a gig drove past me toward Cam- 
bridge, drawn by a stout cob, and driven by a tall, fat, jolly- 
looking farmer, who stared at me as he parsed, went on, look- 
ed back, slackened his pace, looked back again, and at last 
came to a dead stop, and hailed me in a, broad nasal dialect, 

“ Whor be ganging, then, boh I” 

“ To Cambridge.” 

“ Thew’st na git there that gate. Be’est thee honest 
man ?” 

“ I hope so,” said I, somewhat indignantly. 

What’s trade ?” 

“ A tailor,” I said. 

“ Tailor ’ — guide us ! Tailor a-tramp ? Barn’t accoos* 
tomed to tramp, then ?” 

“ I never was out of London before,” said I, meekly ; for 
I was too worn-out to be cross — lengthy and impertinent as 
this cross-examination seemed. « 

“Oi’ll gie thee lift ; dee yow jump in. Gae on, powney ! 
Tailor, then 1 Oh ! ah ! tailor,” saith he. 

I obeyed most thankfully, and sat crouched together, look- 
ing up out of the corner of my eyes at the huge tower of broad ' 
cloth' by my side, and comparing the two red shoulders ot 
mutton which held the reins, with my own wasted, white, 
woman-like fingers. 

I found the old gentleman most inquisitive. He drew out 
of me all my story — questioned me about the way “ Lunnon 
folks” lived, and whether they got ony shooting or *' patten ing’ 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 113 

— whereby I found he meant skating — and broke in, every ' 
now and then, with ejaculations of childish wonder, and 
clumsy sympathy, on my accounts of London labor and Lou- 
don misery. 

“ Oh, father, father ! — I wonders they bears it. Us’n in 
the fens wouldn’t stand that likes. They’d roit, and roit, 
and roit, and tak’ oot the duck-gimes to ’un — they would, as 
they did five and-twenty year agone. Never to goo ayond the 
housen ! — never to goo ayond the housen I Kill me in a 
three months, that would — bor’, then !” 

“Are you a farmer'?” I asked, at last, thinking that my' 
turn for questioning w'as come. 

“ I bean’t varmer; I be yooman born. Never paid rent in 
moy life, nor never wool. I farms my own land, and my 
vathers avore me, this ever so mony hoondred year. I’ve 
got the swoord of ’em to home, and the helmet that they fut 
with into the wars, then when they chopped off the king’s 
head — what was the name of urn ?” 

“ Charles the First ?” 

“ Ees — that’s the booy. We was Parliament side — true 
Britons all we was, down into the fens, and Oliver Cromwell, 
as dug Botsham lode, to the head of us. You coom down to 
Metholl, and I’ll shaw ye a country. I’ll shaAV ’ee some’at 
like bullocks to call, and some’at like a field o’ beans — I wool, 
— none o’ this here darned ups and downs o’ hills” (though 
the country through which we drove was flat enough, I should 
have thought, to please any one), “ to shake a body’s victuals 
out of his inwards — all so flat as a barn’s floor, for vorty mile 
on end — there’s the country to live in ! — and vour sons — or 
was vour on ’em — every one on ’em fifteen stone in his shoes, 
to patten again’ any man from Whit’sea Mere to Denver 
Sluice, for twenty pounds o’ gold ; and there’s the money to 
lay down, and let the man as dare cover it, down with his 
money, and on wi’ his pattens, thirteen-inch runners, down 
the wind, again’. ether a one o’ the bairns !” 

And he jingled in his pocket a heavy bag of gold, and 
'yv nked, and chuckled, and then suddenly checking himself, 
repeated in a sad, dubious tone, two or three times, “ vour on 
’em there was — vour on ’em there was and relieved his 
feelings, by springing the pony into a canter till he came to a 
public house, where he pulled up, called for a pot of hot ale, 
and insisted on treating me. I assured him that I nevei 
drank fermented hquors. 

“ Aw 'I Eh ? How can yow do that then Die o’ cowd 


120 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOK AND POET. 

the fen, that gate, yow would. Love ye then ! they as din 
not tal:’ their spirits down thor tak’ their pennord o’ eleva- 
tion, then — women folk especial.” 

“ What’s elevation ?” 

“ Oh ! ho I ho ! — yow goo into druggist’s shop o’ market 
day, into Cambridge, and you’ll see the little boxes, doozens 
and doozens, a’ ready on the counter ; and irevcr a ven-man’s 
wife goo by, but what calls in for her pennord o’ elevation, to 
last her out the week. Oh ! ho ! ho ! Well, it keeps wom- 
en-folk quiet, it do ; and it’s mortal good agin ago pains.” 

’ “ But what is it ?” 

“ Opium, bor’ alive, opium 1” 

“ But doesn’t it ruin their health ? I should think it the 
very worst sort of drunkenness.” 

“Ow, well, yow moi say that — mak’th ’em cruel thin then, 
it do ; but what can bodies do i’ th’ ago ? Bot it’s a bad 
thing, it is. Harken yow to rnd. Did’st ever know one call- 
ed Porter, to yowr trade ]” 

I thought a little, and recollected a man of that name, who - 
had worked with us a year or two before — a great friend of a 
certain scatter-brained Irish lad, brother of Crossthwaite’s wife. 

“ Well, I did once, but I have lost sight of him twelve 
months, or more.” 

The old man faced sharp round on me, swinging the little 
gig almost over, and then twisted himself back again, and 
put on a true farmer-like look of dogged, stolid reserve. We 
rode on a few minutes in silence. 

“ Dee yow consider, now, that a mon mought be lost, like, 
into Lunnon ?” 

“ How lost I” 

“ Why, yow told o’ thae sweaters — dee yow think a mon 
might get in wi’ one o’ they, and they that mought be looking 
vor un not to find un ?” 

“ I do, indeed. There was a friend of that man Porter 
got turned away from our shop, because he wouldn’t pay some 
tyrannical fine for being saucy, as they called it, to the shop- 
man ; and he went to a sweater’s — and then to another ; 
and his friends have been tracking him up and down this six 
months, and can hear no news of him.” 

“ Av/ ! guide us ! And what’n think yow, be gone wi’ 
un?” 

“ I am afraid he has got into one of those dens, and has 
pawned his clothes, as dozens of them do, for food, and so 
can’t get out.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


121 


“ Pawned his clothes for victuals ! To think o’ that, noo ! 
But if he had work, can’t he get victuals ?” 

Oh !” I said, “ there’s many a man who, after working 
seventeen or eighteen hours a day, Sundays and all, without 
even time to take off his clothes, finds himself brought in 
debt to his tyrant at the week’s end. And if he gets no 
work, the villain won’t let him leave the house ; he has to 
stay there starving, on the chance of an hour’s job. I tell 
you, I’ve known half-a-dozen men imprisoned in that way, in 
a little dungeon of a garret, where they had hardly room to 
stand upright, and only just space to sit and work between 
their beds, without breathing the fresh air, or seeing God’s 
sun, for months together, with no victuals but a few slices of 
bread-and-butter, and a little slop of tea, twice a day, till 
they were starved to the very bone.” 

“Oh, my God ! my God !” said the old man, in a voice 
which had a deeper tone of feeling than mere sympathy wdth 
others’ sorrow was likely to have produced. There was evi- 
dently something behind all these inquiries of his. I longed 
to ask him if his name, too, was not Porter. 

“ Aw yow knawn Billy Porter? What was a like? Tell 
me, now — what was a like, in the Lord’s n^me ! what w'as 
a like unto ?” 

“ Very tall and bony,” I answered. 

“ Ah ! sax feet, and more ? and a yard across ? — but a was 
starved, a was a’ thin, though, maybe, when yow sawn un ? 
— and beautiful fine hair, hadn’t a, like a lass’s ?” 

“ The man I knew had red hair,” quoth I. 

“Ow, ay, an’ that it wor, red as a rising sun, and the curls 
of un like gowlden guineas ! And thou knew’st Billy Porter ! 
To think o’ that, noo — ” 

Another long silence. 

“ Could you find un, doe yow think, noo, into Lunnon ? 
Suppose, now, there was a rlion ’ud gie — may be five pund — 

ten pund — twenty pund, by twenty pund down, for to 

ha’ him brocht home safe and soun’ — could yow do’t, bor’ ? I 
zay, could yow do’t ?” 

“ I could do it as well without the money as with, if I could 
do it at all. But have you no guess as to where he is ?” 

He shook his head sadly. 

“ ‘We — that’s to zay, they as wants un — havn’t heerd tell 
of un vor this three year — three year come Whitsuntide as 
ever was — ” 

And he wiped his eyes with his cufi’. 

F 


ALTON LOCKE, TALLOR AND POET. 


122 

“ Tf you will tell me all about him, and where he was last 
heard of, I will do all I can to find him.” 

“ Will ye, noo ? will ye ? The Lord bless ye for zaying 
that” — and he grasped my hand in his great iron fist, and 
fairly burst out crying. 

“ Was he a relation of yours ?” I asked, gently 

“My bairn — my bairn — my eldest bairn. Dinnot yow ax 
me no moor — dinnot then, bor’. Gie on, yow powney, and 
yow goo leuk vor un.” 

Another long silence. 

“ I’ve a been to Lunnon, looking vor un.” 

Another silence. 

“ I went up and down, up and down, day and night, day 
and night, to all pot-houses as I could zee ; vor, says I, he was 
a’ ways a main chap to drink, he was. Oh, deery me ! and 1 
never cot zight on un — and noo I be most spent, I be — ” 

And he pulled up at another public-house, and tried this 
time a glass of brandy. He stopped, I really think, at every 
inn between that place and Cambridge, and at each tried 
some fresh compound ; but his head seemed, from habit, utter- 
ly fire-proof. 

At last, we neared Cambridge, and began to pass groups of 
gay horsemen, and then those strange caps and gowns — ugly 
and unmeaning remnant of obsolete fashion. 

The old man insisted on driving me up to the gate of Trinity, 
and there dropped me, after I had given him my address, en- 
treating me to “vind the bairn, and coom to zee him down to 
Metholl. But dinnot goo ax for Farmer Porter — they’s all 
Porters there away. Yow ax for Wooden-house Bob — that’s 
me ; and if I barn’t to home, ax for Mucky Billy — that’s my 
brawther — we’re all gotten our names down to ven ; and if 
he barn’t to home, yow ax for Frog-hall — that’s wdiere my 
sister do live ; and they’ll all veed ye, and lodge ye, and wel- 
come come. We be all like one; doon in the ven; and do ye, 
do ye vind my bairn !” And he trundled on, down the nar- 
row street. 

I was soon directed, by various smart-looking servants, to 
my cousin’s rooms ; and after a few mistakes, and wandering 
up and down noble courts and cloisters, swarming with gay 
young men, whose jaunty air and dress seemed strangely out 
of keeping with the stern, antique solemnity of the Gothic 
buildings around, I espied my cousin’s name over a door; and, 
uncertain how he might receive me, I gave a gentle, half- 
apologetic knock, which was answered by a loud “ Come in !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


123 


and I entered on a scene, even more incongruous than anj 
thing I had seen outside. 

'* If we can only keep away from that d — d Jesus as far as 
the corner, I don’t care.” 

“ If we don’t run into that first Trinity before the willows, 
I shall care with a vengeance.” 

“ If we don’t, it’s a pity,” said my cousin. “ Wadharn ran 
up by the side of that first Trinity yesterday, and he said that 
they were as well grueled as s6 many posters, before they got 
to the stile.” 

This unintelligible, and, to my inexperienced ears, blas- 
phemous conversation, proceeded from half-a-dozen powerful 
young men, in low-crowned sailors’ hats and flannel trowsers, 
some in striped jerseys, some in shooting-jackets, some smoking 
cigars, some beating up eggs in sherry ; while my cousin, 
dressed like “ a fancy waterman,” sat on the back of a sofa, 
puffing away a huge meerschaum. 

“ Alton ! why, what wind on earth has blown you here ?” 

By the tone, the words seemed rather an inquiry as to what 
wind would be kind enough to blow me back again. But he 
recovered his self-possession in a moment. 

“ Delighted to see you ! Where’s your portmanteau ? Oh 
—left it at the Bull ! Ah ! I see. Very well, we’ll send the 
gyp for it in a minute, and order some luncheon. We’re just 
going down to the boat-race. Sorry I can’t stop, but we 
shall all be fined — not a moment to lose. I’ll send you in 
luncheon as I go through the butteries ; then, perhaps, you’d 
like to come down and see the race. Ask the gyp to tell 
you the way. Nowq then, follow your noble captain, gentle- 
men — to glory and a supper.” And he bustled out with his 
crew. 

While I was staring about the room, at the jumble of 
Greek books, boxing-gloves, and luscious prints of pretty 
women, a shrewd-faced, smart man entered, much better 
dressed than myself. 

“What would you like, sir? Ox-tail soup, sir, or gravy- 
soup, sir ? Stilton cheese, sir, or Cheshire, sir ? Old Stilton, 
sir, just now.” 

Fearing lest many words might betray my rank — and, 
strange to say, though I should not have been afraid of con 
fessing myself an artisan before the “gentlemen” who had 
just left the room, I was ashamed to have my low estate dis- 
covered, and talked over with his compeers, by the flunky 
who waited on them — I answered, “Any thing — I really 


124 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

doVt care,” in as aristocratic and off-hand a tone as I could 
assume. 

“ Porter or ale, sir ?” 

“Water,” without a “thank you,” I am ashamed to say, 
for I was not at that time quite sure whether it was w'ell-bred 
to be civil to servants. 

The man vanished, and re-appeared with a savory luncheon, • 
silver forks, snowy napkins, smart plates — I felt really quite 
a gentleman. 

He gave me full directions as to my “ way to the boats, 
sir ;” and I started out much refreshed ; passed through back 
streets, dingy, dirty, and profligate-looking enough ; out upon 
wide meadows, fringed with enormous elms ; across a ferry ; 
through a pleasant village, with its old gray church and spire ; 
by the side of a sluggish river, alive with wherries ; along a 
towing-path swarming with bold, bedizened women, who jested 
with the rowers — of their profession, alas ! there could be no 
doubt. I had walked down some mile or so, and just as I 
heard a cannon, as I thought, fire at some distance, and 
wondered at its meaning, I came to a sudden bend of the 
river, with a church-tow'er hanging over the stream on the 
opposite bank, a knot of tall poplars, weeping willows, rich 
(awns, sloping down to the winter’s side, gay with bonnets 
and shawls ; while, along the edge of the stream, light, 
gaudily-painted boats apparently waited for the race, altogeth- 
er the most brilliant and graceful group of scenery which I 
had beheld in my little travels. I stopped to gaze ; and 
imong the ladies on the lawn opposite, caught sight of a 
figure — my heart leapt into my mouth ! Was it she at last ? 
ft was too far to distinguish features ; the dress was altogether 
difierent — but was it not she ? I saw her move across the 
lawn, and take the arm of a tall, venerable looking man ; 
and his dress was the same as that of the dean, at the Dul- 
wich Gallery — was it? was it not? To have found her, 
and a river between us ' It was ludicrously miserable — 
miserably ludicrous. Oh, that accursed river, which debarred 
me from certainty, from bliss ! I would have plunged across 
— but there were three objections — first, that I could not 
swim ; next, what could I do when I had crossed ? and 
thirdly, it might not be she, after all. 

And yet I was certain — instinctively certain — that it was 
she, the idol of my imagination for years. If I could' not see 
her features under that little white bonnet, I could imagine 
them there ; they flashed up in my memory as fresh as ever. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


125 


Did she remember my features, as I did hers] Would she 
know me again ? Had she ever even thought of me, from 
that day to this ? Fool ! But there I stood, fascinated, 
gazing across the river, heedless of the racing-boats, and the 
crowd, and the roar that was rushing up to me at the rate 
of ten miles an hour, and, in a moment more, had caught me, 
and swept me away with it, whether 1 would or not, along 
the towing-path, by the side of the foremost boats. 

Oh, the Babel of horse and foot, young and old ! the cheer- 
ing, and the exhorting, and the objurgations of number this, 
and number that! and the yelling of the most sacred names, 
intermingled too often with oaths. And yet, after a few 
moments, I ceased to wonder either at the Cambridge passion 
for boat-racing, or at the excitement of the spectators. “ lioni 
soil qui mat y pe^ise” It was a noble sport — a sight such 
as could only be seen in England — some hundred of young 
men, who might, if they had chosen, been lounging efiemi- 
nately about the streets, subjecting themselves voluntarily to 
that intense exertion, for the mere pleasure of toil. The true 
English stud' came out there ; I felt that, in spite of all my 
prejudices — the stud" which has held Gibraltar and conquered 
at Waterloo — which has created a Birmingham and a Man- 
chester, and colonized every quarter of the globe — that grim, 
earnest, stubborn energy, which, since the days of the old 
Romans, the English po.ssess alone of all the nations of the 
earth. I was as proud of the gallant young fellows, as if 
they had been my brothers — of their courage and endurance 
(for one could see that it was no child’s-play, from the pale 
faces and panting lips), their strength and activity, so fierce 
and yet so cultivated, smooth, harmonious, as oar kept time 
with oar, and every back rose and fell in concert — and felt 
my soul stirred up to a sort of sweet madness, not merely by 
the shouts and cheers of the mob around me, but by the loud, 
fierce pulse of the rowlocks, the swift whispering rush of the 
long, snake-like eight oars, the swirl and gurgle of the water 
in their wake, the grim, breathless silence of the straining 
rjwers. My blood boiled over, and fierce tears swelled into 
my eyes ; for I, too, was a man, and an Englishman ; and 
when I caught sight of my cousin, pulling stroke to th(» 
second boat in the long line, with set teeth and flashing eyes, 
the great muscles on his bare arms springing up into knots 
at every rapid stroke, I ran and shouted among the maddest 
and the foremost. 

But I soon tired, and, footsore as I was, began to find my 


126 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


strength Jail me. I tried to drop behind, but found it impos- 
sible in the press. At last, quite out of breath, I stopped ; 
and instantly received a heavy blow from behind, which 
threw me on my face. I looked up, and saw a huge long- 
legged gray horse, with his knees upon my back, in the act 
of falling over me. His rider, a little ferret-visaged boy, 
dressed in sporting style, threw himself back in the saddle, 
and recovered the horse in an instant, with a curse at me, as 
I rolled down the steep bank into the river, among the laugh- 
ter and shouts of the women, who seemed to think it quite a 
grand act on the part of the horseman. 

“ Well saved, upon my word, my lord !” shouted out a rider 
beside him. 

“ Confound the snob ! — I’m glad he got his ducking. 
What do the fellows want here, getting in a gentleman’s 
way ?” 

“ For shame, Swindon ! the man is hurt,” said another 
rider, a very tall and handsome man, who pulled up his horse, 
and, letting the crowd pass, sprang off to my assistance. 

“ Leave him alone, Lord Lynedale,” said one of the wo- 
men ; “ let him go home and ask his mammy to hang hinj 
out to dry.” 

“ Why do you bother yourself with such muffs ?” &c., &c , 
&c. 

But I had scrambled out, and stood there dripping, and 
shaking with rage and pain. 

“I hope you are not much hurt, my man?” asked the 
nobleman, in a truly gentlemanlike, because truly gentle, 
voice ; and he pulled out half-a-crown, and offered it to me, 
saying, “ I am quite ashamed to see one of my own rank 
behave in a way so unworthy of it.” 

But I, in my shame and passion, thrust back at once the 
coin and the civility. 

“ I want neither you nor your money,” said I, limping off 
down the bank. “ It serves me right, for getting among you 
cursed aristocrats.” 

How the nobleman took my answer I did not stay to see, 
for I was glad to escape the jeers of the bystanding black- 
guards, male and female, by scrambling over the fences, and 
making my way across the fields back to Cambridge. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

THE LOST IDOL FOUND. 

On my return, I found my cousin already at home, in high 
spirits at having, as he informed me, “ bumped the first Trin- 
ity.” I excused myself for my dripping state, simply by say- 
ing that I had slipped into the river. To tell him the -whole 
of the story, while the insult still rankled fresh in me, was 
really too disagreeable both to my memory and my pride. 

“Then came the question, “What had brought me to 
Cambridge ?” I told him all, and he seemed honestly to 
sympathize with my misfortunes. 

“ Never mind ; we’ll make it all right somehow. Those 
poems of yours — you must let me have them and look over 
them ; and I daresay I shall persuade the governor to do 
something w'ith them. After all, it’s no loss for you ; you 
couldn’t have gone on tailoring — much too sharp a fellow for 
that ; you ought to be at college, if one could only get you 
there. These sizarships, now, were meant for just such cases 
as yours — clever fellows who could not afford to educate 
themselves ; but, like every thing in the university, the people 
for whom they are meant never get them. Do you know 
what the golden canon is, Alton, for understanding all uni- 
versity questions ?” 

“ No.” 

“ Then I’ll tell you. That the employment of any money 
whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever, is a certain sign that 
it was originally meant for some purpose totally different.” 

“ What do you mean ?” I asked. 

“ Oh ! you shall stay here with me a few days, and you’ll 
soon find out. Hush ! now ; don’t come the independent 
dodge. One cousin may visit another, I hope, without con- 
tracting obligations, and all that. I’ll find you a bedroom 
out of college, and you’ll live in my rooms all day, and I’ll 
show you a thing or two. How do you like the university f’ 

“ The buildings,” I said, “ strike me as very noble and rev- 
erent.” 

“ They are the only noble and reverent things you’ll find 
here, I can tell you. It’s a system of humbug, from one end 
to the other. But the Dons get their living by it, and their 
livings too, and their bishopricks, now and^then ; and I intend 


128 


ALTON LOCKE, l AILOR AND POET. 


to do the same, if I have a chance. Do at Home as Rome 
does.” And he lighted his pipe and winked knowingly at me. 

I mentioned the profane use of sacred names which had so 
disgusted me at the boat-race He laughed. 

“Ah! my dear fellow, it’s a very fair specimen of Cam- 
bridge — shows what’s the matter with us all — putting new 
wine into old bottles, and into young bottles, too, as you’ll 
see at my supper party to-night.” 

“ Really,” I said, “ I am not fit for presentation at any 
such aristocratic amusements.” 

“ Oh ! ITl lend you clothes till your owm are dried ; and as 
for behavior, hold your tongue, and don’t put your knife in 
your mouth, are quite rules enough to get any man mistaken 
for a gentleman here.” And he laughed again in his peculiar 
sneering way. 

“ By-the-by, don’t get drunk ; for in vino veritas. You 
know what that means.” % 

“ So well,” I answered, “ that I never intend to touch a 
drop of fermented liquor.” 

“ Capital rule for a poor man. I’ve got a strong head, 
luckily. If I hadn’t, I should keep sober on principle. It’s 
great fun to have a man taking you into his confidence after 
the second bottle ; and then to see the funk he’s in next day, 
w'hen he recollects he’s shown you more of his hand than is 
good for his own game.” 

All this sickened me ; and I tried to turn the conversation, 
by asking him what he meant by new wine in old bottles. 

“ Can’t you see ? The whole is monastic — dress, unmar- 
ried fellows, the very names of the colleges. I dare say it did 
very well for the poor scholars in the middle ages, who, three- 
fourths of them, turned either monks or priests ; but it won’t 
do for the young gentlemen of the 19th century. Those 
very names of colleges are of a piece with the rest. The col- 
leges were dedicated to various sacred personages and saints, 
to secure their interest in heaven for the prosperity of the col- 
lege ; but who believes in all that now ? And therefore the 
names remain only to be desecrated. The men can’t help it. 
They must call the colleges by their names.” 

“ Why don’t they alter the names ?” I said. 

“ Because, my dear fellow, they are afraid to alter any 
thing, for fear of bringing the whole rotten old house down 
about their ears. They say themselves, that the slightest 
innovation will be a precedent for destroying the whole sys- 
tem, bit by bit. "VV^hy should they be afraid of that, if they 




ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR .\JND POET. 129 

did not know that the whole system would not hear canvass^ 
ing an instant ? That’s why they retain statutes that can’t 
be observed ; because they know, if they once began altering 
the statutes the least, the world would find out how they 
have themselves been breaking the statutes. That’s why 
they keep up the farce of swearing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, 
and all that ; just because they know, if they attempted to 
alter the letter of the old forms, it would come out, that half 
the young men of the university don’t believe three words of 
them at heart. They know the majority of us are at heart 
neither churchmen nor Christians, nor even decently moral : 
but the one thing they are afraid of is scandal. So they con- 
nive at the young men’s ill-doings ; they take no real steps to 
put down profligacy ; and, in the mean time, they just keep 
up the forms of Church of Englandism, and pray devoutly that 
the whole humbug may last out their time. There isn’t one 
Don in a hundred who has any personal influence over the 
gown-smen. A man may live here from the time he’s a 
Ireshrnan, to the time he’s taken his degree, without evei 
being spoken to as if he had a soul to be saved ; unless he 
happens to bo one of the Simeonito party ; and they are get- 
ting fewer and fewer every year ; and in ten years more there 
won’t be one of them left, at the present rate. Besides, they 
have no influence ever the rest of the under-graduates. They 
are very good, excellent fellows in their way, I do believe ; 
but they are not generally men of talent ; and they keep 
entirely to themselves ; and know nothing, and care nothing 
for the questions of the day.” 

And so he rambled on, complaining and sneering, till sup- 
per time ; when we went out and lounged about the vener- 
able cloisters, while the room was being cleared and the 
cloth laid. 

To describe a Cambridge supper party among gay young 
men is a business as little suited to my taste as to my powers. 
The higher classes ought to know pretty well what such 
things are like ; and the working-men are not altogether 
ignorant, seeing that Peter Priggins and other university men 
have been turning Alma Mater’s shame to as lucrative ac- 
count in their fictions, as the Irish scribblers have that of 
their mother country. But I must say, that I was utterly 
disgusted ; and when, after the removal of the eatables, the 
whole party, twelve or fourteen in number, set to work tc 
drink hard and deliberately at milk punch, and bishop, and 
copus, and grog, and I know not what other inventions of 

F* 


130 


ALTON LpCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


bacchanalian luxury, and to sing, one after another, songs ot 
the most brutal indecency, I was glad to escape into the cool 
night air, and under pretense of going home, wander up and 
down the King’s Parade, and watch the tall gables of King’s 
College Chapel, and the classic front of the Senate* house, and 
the stately tower of St. Mary’s, as they stood, stern and silent, 
bathed in the still glory of the moonshine, and seeming to 
watch, with a steadfast sadness, the scene of frivolity and sin, 
Pharisaism, formalism, hypocrisy, and idleness below. 

Noble buildings ! and noble institutions ! given freely to the 
people, by those who loved the people, and the Saviour who 
died for them. They gave us what they had, those mediaeval 
founders : whatsoever narrowness of mind or superstition de- 
filed their gift was not their fault, but the fault of their whole 
age. The best they knew they imparted freely, and God 
Mall reward them for it. To monopolize those institutions 
for the rich, as is done now, is to violate both the spirit and 
the letter of the foundations ; ’to restrict their studies to the 
limits of middle- age Romanism,* their conditions of admission 
to those -fixed at the Pweformation, is but a shade less wrong- 
ful. The letter is kept — the spirit is thrown away. You 
refuse to admit any who are not members of the Church of 
England ; say, rather, any who will not sign the dogmas of 
the Church of England, whether they believe a Mwd of them 
or not. Useless formalism I which lets through the reckless, 
the profligate, the ignorant, the hypocritical ; and only ex- 
cludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of the 
intellectual M’^orking-men. And whose fault is it that they 
are not members of the Church of England ? Whose fault 
is it, I ask'? Your predecessors neglected the loM^er orders, 
till they have ceased to reverence either you or your doctrines ; 
you confess that, among yourselves, freely enough. You 
throw the blame of the present Made-spread dislike to the 
Church of England on her sins during “ the godless 18th cen- 
tury.” Be it so. Why are those sins to be visited on us ? 
Why are we to be shut out from the universities, M^hich were 
founded for us, because you have let us grow up, by millions, 
heathens and infidels, as you call us % Take away your 

* This, like the rest of Mr. Locke’s Cambridge reminiscences may 
appear to many exaggerated and unfair. But he seems to be speaking 
of both universities, and at a time when they had not even commenced 
the process of reformation. We fear, however, that in spite of many 
noble exceptions, his picture of Cambridge represents, if not the w’hole 
truth, still the impression w'hich she leaves on the minds of loo many, 
strangers and, alas ! students also. — Ed. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 131 

Bubterfuge ! It is not merely because we are bad church- 
men that you exclude us, else you would be crowding your col- 
leges, now, with the talented poor of the agricultural districts, 
who, as you say, remain faithful to the church of their fathers. 
But are there six laborers’ sons educating in the universities 
at this moment ? No ! The real reason for our exclusion, 
churchmen or not, is because we are poor — because we can 
not pay your exorbitant fees, often, as in the case of bachelors 
f arts, exacted for tuition which is never given, and residence 
which is not permitted — because we could not support the 
extravagance which you not only permit, but encourage, be- 
cause, by your own unblushing confession, it insures the uni- 
versity “the support of the aristocracy.” 

“ But, on religious points, at least, you must abide by the 
statutes of the university.” 

Strange argument, truly, to be urged literally by English 
Protestants in possession of Roman Catholic bequests ! If 
that be true in the letter, as well as in the spirit, you should 
have given place long ago to the Dominicans and the Fran- 
ciscans. In the spirit it is true, and the Reformers acted on 
it when they rightly converted the universities to the uses of 
the new faith. They carried out the spirit of the founders’ 
statutes by making the universities as good as they could be, 
and letting them share in the new light of the Elizabethan 
age. But was the sum of knowledge, human and divine, per- 
fected at the Reformation ? Who gave the Reformers, or you, 
who call yourselves their representatives, a right to say to the 
mind of man, and to the teaching of God’s Spirit, “ Hitherto, 
and no farther!” Society and mankind, the children of the 
Supreme, will not stop growing for your dogmas — much less 
for your vested interests ; and the righteous law of mingled 
development and renovation, applied in the sixteenth century, 
must be re-applied in the nineteenth ; while the spirits of the 
founders, now purged from the superstitions and ignorances 
of their age, shall smile from heaven, and say, “ So would we 
have had it, if we had lived in the great nineteenth century, 
into which it has been your privilege to be born.” 

But such thoughts soon passed away. The image which I 
had seen that afternoon upon the river-banks, had awakened 
imperiously the frantic longings of past years ; and now it re- 
ascended its ancient throne, and tyrannously drove forth every 
other object, to keep me alone with its own tantalizing and 
torturing beauty. I did not think about her — No; I only 
stupidly and steadfastly stared at her with my whole soul and 


132 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


imagination, through that long sleepless night ; and in spite 
of the fatigue of my journey, and the stiflhess proceeding from 
my fall and wetting, I lay tossing till the early sun poured 
into my bedroom window. Then I arose, dressed myself, and 
went out to wander up and down the streets, gazing at one 
splendid building after another, till I found the gates of King’s 
College open. I entered eagerly, through a porch which, to 
my untutored taste, seemed gorgeous enough to form the en- 
trance to a fairy palace, and stood in the quadrangle, riveted 
to the spot 'by the magnificence of the huge chapel on the 
right. 

If I had admired it the night before, I felt inclined to wor- 
ship it this morning, as I saw the lofty buttres.ses and spires, 
fretted with all their gorgeous carving, and “ storied windows 
richly dight,” sleeping in the glare of the newly risen sun, and 
throwing their long shadows due westward down the sloping 
lawn, and across the river which dimpled and gleamed below, 
till it was lost among the towering masses of crisp elms and 
rose-garlanded chestnuts in the rich gardens beyond. 

Was I delighted? Yes, and yet no. There is a painful 
feeling in seeing any thing magnificent which one can not un- 
derstand. And perhaps it was a morbid sensitiveness, but 
the feeling was strong upon me that I was an interloper there 
— out of harmony with the scene and the system which had 
created it ; that I might be an object of unpleasant curiosity, 
perhaps of scorn (for 1 had not forgotten the nobleman at the 
boat-race), amid those monuments of learned luxury. Per- 
haps, on thfe other hand, it was only from the instinct which 
makes us seek for solitude under the pressure of intense emo- 
tions, when we have neither language to express them to 
ourselves, nor loved one in whose silent eyes we may read 
kindred feelings — a sympathy which wants no words. What- 
ever the cause was, when a party of men, in their caps and 
gowns, approached me down the dark avenue which led into 
the country, I was glad to shrink for concealment behind the 
weeping-willow at the foot of the bridge, and slink ofi’ unob- 
served to breakfast with my cousin. 

We had just finished breakfast, my cousin was lighting his 
meerschaum, when a tall figure passed the window, and the 
taller of the noblemen, whom I had seen at the boat-race, 
entered the room with a packet of papers in his hand. 

“Here, Locule mi! my pocket-book — or rather, to stretch 
a bad pun till it bursts, my pocket dictionary. I require the 
aid of your benevolently-squandered talents for the correction 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 133 

of these proofs. I am, as usual, both idle and busy this morn* 
ing ; so draw pen, and set to work for me.” 

I am exceedingly sorry, my lord,” answered George, in 
his most obsequious tone, “ but 1 must work this morning with 
all my might. Last night, recollect, was given to triumph, 
Bacchus, and idleness.” 

“ Then find some one who will do them for me, my Ulysses 
polumechane, polutrope, panurge.” 

“I shall be most happy (with a half-frown and a wince), 
to play Panurge to your lordship’s Pantagruel on board the 
new yacht.” 

“Oh, I am perfect in that character, I suppose? And is 
she, after all, like Pantagruel’s ship to be loaded with hemp ? 
Well, we must try two or three milder cargoes first. But come, 
find me some starving genius — some graeculus esuri&ns — ” 

“ Who will ascend to the heaven of your lordship’s elo- 
quence for the bidding ?” 

“ Five shillings a sheet — there will be about two of them, 1 
think, in the pamphlet.” 

“ May I take the liberty of recommending my cousin here ?” 

“ Your cousin ?” And he turned to me, who had been 
examining with a sad and envious eye the contents of the 
bookshelves. Our eyes met, and first a faint blush, and 
then a smile of recognition passed over his magnificent coun- 
tenance. 

“ 1 think I had — I am ashamed that 1 can not say the 
pleasure of meeting him at the boat-race yesterday.” 

My cousin looked inquiringly and vexed at us both. The 
nobleman smifed. 

“Oh, the shame was ours, not his.” 

“ I can not think,” I answered, “that you have any reasons 
to remember with shame your own kindness and courtesy. 
As for me,” I went on bitterly, “ I suppose a poor journeyman 
tailor, who ventures to look on at the sports of gentlemen 
only deserves to be ridden over.” 

“ Sir,” ho said, looking at me with a severe and searching 
glance, “ Your bitterness is pardonable — but not your sneer. 
You do not yourself think what you say, and you ought to 
know that I think it still less than yourself. If you intend 
your irony to be useful, you should keep it till you can use it 
courageously against the true offenders.” 

I looked up at him fiercely enough, but the placid smile 
which had returned to his face disarmed me. 

“ Your class,” he went on, “ blind yourselves and our class 


134 


ALTON LOCKB, TAILOR AND POET. 


as much by wholesale denunciations of us, as we, alas ! whc 
should know better, do by wholesale denunciations of you. 
As you grow older, you will learn that there are exceptions 
to every rule.” 

“ And yet the exception proves the rule.” 

“ Most painfully true, sir. But that argument is two-edged. 
For instance, am I to consider it the exception or the rule, 
when I am told, that you, a journeyman tailor, are able to 
correct these proofs for me ?” 

“ Nearer the rule, I think, than you yet fancy.” 

“ You speak out boldly and well; but how can you judge 
what I may please to fancy ? At all events, I will make 
trial of you. There are the proofs. Bring them to me by 
four o’clock this afternoon, and if they are well done, I will 
pay you more than I should to the average hack-writer, for 
you will deserve more.” 

I took the proofs ; he turned to go, and by a side-look at 
G eorge beckoned him out of the room. I heard a whispering 
in the passage ; and I do not deny that my heart beat high 
wdth new hopes as I caught unwillingly the words — 

“ Such a forehead ! such an eye ! such a contour of feature 
as that ! Locule mi — that boy ought not to be mending 
trowsers.” 

My cousin returned, half laughing, half angry. 

Alton, you fool, why did you let out that you were a 
snip?” 

“ I am not ashamed of my trade.” 

“I am, then. However you’ve done with it now; and if 
you can’t come the gentleman, you may as well come the 
rising genius. The self-educated dodge pays well just now ; 
and after all, you’ve hooked his lordship — thank me for that. 
But you’ll never hold him, you 'impudent dog, if you pull so 
hard on him,” he went on, putting his hands into his coat-tail 
pockets and sticking himself in front of the fire, like the Del- 
phic Pythoness upon the sacred tripod, in hopes, I suppose of 
some oracular afflatus, “ you will never hold him, I say, if you 
pull so hard on him. You ought to ‘ My lord’ him for months 
yet at least. You know, my good fellow, you must take 
every possible care to pick up what good breeding you can, if 
I take the trouble to put you in the way of good society, and 
tell you where my private bird’s-nests are, like the green 
school-boy some poet or other talks of.” 

“ He is no lord of mine,” I answered, “ in any sense of the 
word, and therefore I shall not call him so.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


135 


'* Upon my honor ! here is a young gentleman who intends 
to rise in the world, and then commences by trying to walk 
through the first post he meets ! Noodle ! can’t you do like 
me, and get out of the carts’ way when they come by ? If 
you intend to go ahead, you must just dodge in and out, like a 
dog at a fair. ‘ She stoops to conquer’ is my motto, and a pre- 
cious good one too.” 

“ I have no wish to conquer Lord Lynedale, and so I shall 
not stoop to him.” 

“ I have then, and to very good purpose, too. I am his 
whetstone, for polishing up that classical wit of his on, till he 
carries it into parliament to astonish the country squires. He 
fancies himself a second Goethe ; I hav’ii’t forgot his hitting 
at me, before a large supper-party, with a certain epigram of 
that old turkey-cock’s, about the whale having his unmen- 
tionable parasite — and the great man likewise. Whale, in- 
deed ! I bide my time, Alton, my boy, I bide my time; and 
then let your grand aristocrat look out ! If he does not find 
the supposed whale-unmentionable a good stout holding har- 
poon, with a tough line to it, and a long one, it’s a pity, Al- 
ton, my boy !” 

And he burst into a coarse laugh, tossed himself down on 
the sofa, and re-lighted his meerschaum. 

“He seemed to me,” I answered, “to have a peculiar court- 
esy and liberality of mind toward those below him in rank.” 

“Oh ! he had, had he] Now, I’ll just put you up to a 
dodge. He intends to come the Mirabeau — fancies his mantle 
has fallen on him, prays before the fellow’s bust, I believe, 
if one knew the truth, for a double portion of his spirit ; and 
therefore it is a part of his game to ingratiate himself with all 
pot-boy-dom, while at heart he is as proud, exclusive an aris- 
tocrat as ever wore nobleman’s hat. At all events, you may 
get something out of him if you play your cards well — or, 
rather help me to play mine ; for I consider him as my prop- 
erty, and you only as my aid-de-camp.” 

“ I shall play no one’s cards,” I answered, sulkily. “ I am 
doing work fairly, and shall be fairly paid for it, and keep my * 
own independence.” 

“Independence! hey-day! Have you forgotten that, after 
all, you are my — guest, to call it by the mildest term ?” 

“ Do you upbraid me with that ?” I said, starting up. 

“ Do you expect me to live on your charity, on condition of 
doing your dirty work ? You do not know me, sir. I leave 
your roof this instant !” 


13G 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ You do not !” answered he, laughing loudly, as he sprang 
over the sofa, and set his back against the door. “ Come, 
come, you Will-o’-the-Wisp, as full of flights, and fancies, 
and vagaries, as a sick old maid ! can’t you see which side 
your bread is buttered ? Sit down, I say ! Don’t you know 
that I’m as good-natured a fellow as ever lived, although I do 
parade a little Gil Bias morality now and then, just for fun’s 
sake ? Do you think I should be so open with it, if I meant 
any thing very diabolic ? There — sit down, and don’t go 
into King Cambyses’ vein, or Queen Hecuba’s tears, either, 
which you seem inclined to do.” 

“ I know you have been very generous to me,” said I, peni- 
tently, “ but a kindness becomes none when you are upbraided 
with it.” 

“ So say the copy books — I deny it. At all events. I’ll 
say no more ; and you shall sit down there, and write as still 
as a mouse, till two, while I tackle this never-to-be-enough- 
by-unhappy-third-years’-men-execrated Griffin’s Optics.” 

At four that afternoon, I knocked, proofs in hand, at the 
door of Lord Lynedale’s rooms in the King’s Parade. The 
door was opened by a little elderly groom, gray-coated, gray- 
gaitered, gray-haired, gray-visaged. He had the look of a 
respectable old family retainer, and his exquisitely neat groom’s 
dress gave him a sort of interest in my eyes. Class costumes, 
relics though they are of feudalism, carry a charm with them. 
They are symbolic, definitive: they bestow a personality on 
the wearer, which satisfies the mind, by enabling it instantly 
to classify him, to connect him with a thousand stories and as- 
sociations ; and to my young mind, the wiry, shrewd, honest, 
grim old serving-rnan seemed the incarnation of all the wonders 
of Newmarket, and the hunting-kennel, and the steeple-chase, 
of which I had read, with alternate admiration and contempt, 
in the newspapers. 

From between his legs peeped out a mass of shaggy griz- 
zled hair, containing a Skye-terrier’s eyes, and a long snout, 
which, by its twisting and sniffing, seemed investigating 
whether my trowsers came within the biting degree of shab- 
biness. 

“ And what do you want here, young man ?” 

“I was bidden by Lord Lynedale to come here at four 
with these papers.” 

“ Oh, yes ! very likely ! that’s an old story ; and to be paid 
money, I guess V' 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


137 


“ And to be paid money.” 

“Not a doubt on’t. Then you must wait a little longer, 
like the rest of you bloodsuckers. Go back, and tell your 
master, that he needn’t send your sort here any more, with 
his post obits, and post mortems, and the like devilry. The 
old earl’s good to last these three months more, fne Lord bo 
praised. Therefore, come, sir — you go back to your master, 
and take him my compliments, and — ” 

“ I have no master,” quoth I, puzzled, but half laughing ; 
for I liked the old fellow’s iron honest visage. 

“ No master, eh ? then darned if you shall come in. Comes 
on your own account, eh ? Got a little bit of paper for his 
lordship in that bundle?” 

“ I told you already that I had,” said I, peevishly. 

“ Werry good ; but you didn’t tell me w'hether they come 
from the bayleaves or not.” 

“Nonsense ! Take the papers in yourself, if you like.” 

“ Oh, you young wagabond ! Do you take me for Judas 
Iscariot ? And what do you expect — to set a man on serving 
a MTit on a man’s own master? Wait a bit, till I gets the 
hors’up, that’s all, and I’ll show you what’s what.” 

If I could not understand him, the dog did ; for he ran in- 
stantly at my legs, secured a large piece of my best trowsers, 
and was returning for a second, if I had not, literally, in my 
perplexity thrust the clean proofs into his mouth, which he 
worried and shook, as if they had been the grandfather of all 
white mice. At this moment, the inner door opened, and 
Lord Lynedale appeared. There was an explanation, and a 
laugh, in which I could not but join, in spite of the torn 
trowsers, at the expense of the groom. The old man retired, 
mingling his growls with those of the terrier, and evidently 
quite disappointed at my not being a dun — an honest, douce 
barn-door fowl, and not fera naturcE, and fair game for his 
sporting propensities. 

Lord Lynedale took me into the inner room, and bade me 
sit down while he examined the proofs. I looked round the 
low-wainscoted apartment, with its narrow mullioned win- 
dows, in extreme curiosity. What a real nobleman’s abode 
could be like, was naturally w^orth examining, to one who had, 
all his life, heard of the aristocracy as of some mythic Titans 
— whether fiends or gods being yet a doubtful point — alto- 
gether enshrined on “ cloudy Olympus,” invisible to mortal 
ken. The shelves were gay with Morocco, Russia leather, 
and gilding — not much used, as I thought, till my eye caught 


138 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

one of the gorgeously-bound volumes lying on the table in 
a loose cover of polished leather — a refinement of which poor 
I should never have dreamt. The walls were covered with 
prints, which soon turned my eyes from every thing else, 
to range delighted over Landseers, Turners, Roberts’s Eastern 
Sketches, the ancient Italian masters ; and I recognized, with 
a sort of friendly affection, an old print of my favorite St. 
Sebastian, in the Dulwich Gallery. It brought back to my 
mind a thousand dreams, and a thousand sorrows. Would 
those dreams be ever realized 1 Might this new acquaintance 
possibly open some pathway toward their fulfillment ? — some 
vista toward the attainment of a station where they would, at 
least, be less chimerical ? And at that thought, my heart 
beat loud with hope. The room was choked up with chairs 
and tables, of all sorts of strange shapes and problematical 
uses. The floor was strewed with skins of bear, deer, and 
seal. In a corner lay hunting-whips and fishing-rods, foils, 
boxing-gloves, and gun- cases; while over the chimney-piece, 
an array of rich Turkish pipes, all amber and enamel, con- 
trasted curiously with quaint old swords and daggers — bronze 
classic casts, upon gothic oak brackets, and fantastic scraps 
of continental carving. On the centre-table, too, reigned the 
same rich profusion, or, if you will, confusion — MSS. “Notes 
in Egypt,” “Goethe’s Walverwandschaften,” Murray’s Hand- 
books, and “Plato’s Republic.” What was there not there? 
And I chucltled inwardly, to see how BelVs Life in Loiulon 
and the Ecclesiologist had, between them, got down “ McCul- 
loch on Taxation,” and were sitting, arm-in-arm, triumphantly 
astride of him. Every thing in the room, even to the fragrant 
flowers in a German glass, spoke of a traveled and cultivated 
luxury — manifold tastes and powers of self-enjoyment and 
self-irnprovrnent, which Heaven forgive me if I envied, as I 
looked upon them. If I, now, had had one-twentieth part of 
those books, prints, that experience of life, not to mention 
that physical strength and beauty, which stood towering 
there before the fire — so simple — so utterly unconscious of 
the innate nobleness and grace which shone out from every 
motion of those stately limbs and features — all the delicacy 
which blood can give, combined, as one does sometimes see, 
with the broad strength of the proletarian — so difierent from 
poor me ! — and so different too, as I recollected with perhaps 
a savage pleasure, from the miserable, stunted specimen of 
over-bred imbecility which had ridden over me the day before. 
A strange question that of birth ! and one in which the phi- 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


139 


losopher, in spite of himself, must come to democratic conclu- 
sions. For, after all, the physical and intellectual superiority 
of the high-born is only preserved, as it was in the old Norman 
times, by the continual practical abnegation of the very caste- 
lie on which they pride themselves — by continual renovation 
of their race, by intermarriage with the ranks below them. 
The blood of Odin flowed in the veins of Norman William ; 
true — and so did the tanner’s of Falaise I 

At last he looked up, and spoke courteously — 

“ I’m afraid 1 have kept you long ; hut now, here is for 
your corrections, which are capital. I have really to thank 
you for a lesson in writing English.” And Hfe put a sovereign 
into my hand. 

“ I am very sorry,” said I, “ but I have no change.” 

“ Never mind that. Your work is well worth the money.” 
“ But,” I said, “ you agreed with me for five shillings a 
sheet, and — I do not wish to be rude, but I can not accept 
your kindness. We working-men make a rule of abiding by 
our wages, and taking nothing which looks like — ” 

“ W’^ell, well — and a very good rule it is. I suppose, 
then, I must find out some way for you to earn more. Good 
afternoon.” And he motioned me out of the room, fol- 
lowed me down-stairs, and turned off toward the College 
Gardens. 

I wandered up and down, feeding my greedy eyes, till I found 
myself again upon the bridge where I had stood that morning, 
gazing with admiration and astonishment at a scene which 
I have often expected to see painted or described, and which, 
nevertheless, in spite of its unique magnificence, seems strangely 
overlooked by those who cater for the public taste, with pen 
and pencil. The vista of bridges, one after another, spanning 
the stream ; the long line of great monastic palaces, all un- 
like, and yet all in harmony, sloping down to the stream, with 
their trim lawns and ivied-walls, their towers and buttresses ; 
and opposite them, the range of rich gardens and noble tim- 
ber-trees, dimly seen through which, at the end of the gor- 
geous river avenue, towered the lofty buildings of St. John’s. 
The whole scene, under the glow of a rich May afternoon, 
seemed to me a fragment out of the “ Arabian Nights” or 
Spenser’s “ Fairy Queen.” I leaned upon the parapet, and 
gazed, and gazed, so absorbed in wonder and enjoyment, that 
I was quite unconscious, for some time, that Lord Lynedale 
was standing by my side, engaged in the same employment. 
Ho was not alone. Hanging on his arm was a lady, whose 


140 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


face, it seemed to me, I ought to know. It certainly was < r.e 
not to be easily forgotten. She was beautiful, but with the 
face and figure rather of a Juno than a Venus — dark, imperi- 
ous, restless — the lips almost too firmly set, the brow almost 
too massive and projecting — a queen, rather to be feared than 
loved — but a queen still, as truly royal as the man into whose 
face she was looking up with eager admiration and delight, as 
he pointed out to her eloquently the several beauties of the 
landscape. Her dress was as plain as that of any Quaker, 
but the grace of its arrangement, of every line and fold, wai. 
enough, without the help of the heavy gold bracelet on hei 
wrist, to proclaim her a fine lady ; by which term, I wish to 
express the result of that perfect education in taste and man 
ner, down to every gesture, which Heaven forbid that I, pro 
fessing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful ; and 
therefore I welcome it, in the name of the Author of all 
beauty. I value it so highly, that I would fain see it extend, 
not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman’s villa, but thence, 
as I believe it one day will, to the laborer’s hovel, and the 
needlewoman’s garret. 

Half in bashfulness, half in the pride which shrinks from 
any thing like intrusion, I was moving away ; but the noble- 
man, recognizing me with a smile and a nod, made some ob- 
servation on the beauty of the scene before us. Before I could 
answer, however, I saw that his companion’s eyes were fixed 
intently on my face. 

“Is this,” she said to Lord Lynedale, “ the young person of 
whom you were speaking to me just now ! I fancy that I rec- 
ollect him, though, I dare say, he has forgotten me.” 

If I had forgotten the face, that voice, so peculiarly rich, 
deep, and marked in its pronunciation of every syllable, re- 
called her instantly to my mind. It was the dark lady of 
the Dulwich Gallery ! 

“ I met, you, I think,” I said, “ at the picture-gallery at 
Dulwich, and you were kind enough, and — and some persons 
who were with you, to talk to me about a picture there.” 

“Yes; Guido’s St. Sebastian. You seemed fond of reading, 
then. I am glad to see you at college.” 

I explained, that I was not at college. That led to fresh 
gentle questions on her part, till I had given her all the lead 
ing points of my history. There was nothing in it of which 
I ought to have been ashamed. 

She seemed to become more and more interested in my 
story, and her companion also. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND^POET. 


141 


“ And have you tried to write ? I recollect my uncle 
advising you to try a poem on St. Sebastian. It was spoken, 
perhaps, in jest ; but it will not, I hope, have been laboi 
lost, if you have taken it in earnest.” 

“Yes — I have written on that and on other subjects, during 
the last few years.” 

“ Then, you must let us see them, if you have them with 
you. I think my uncle, Arthur, might like to look over 
t hem ; and if they were fit for publication, he might be abk 
to do something toward it.” 

“At all events,” said Lord Lynedale, “a self-educated 
author is always interesting. Bring any of your poems that 
you have with you, to the Eagle this afternoon, and leave 
them there fur Dean Winnstay ; and to-morrow morning, if 
you have nothing better to do, call there between ten and 
eleven o’clock.” 

lie wrote me down the dean’s address, and nodding a civil 
good morning, turned away with his queenly companion, while 
I stood gazing after him, wondering whether all noblemen 
and high-born ladies were like them in person and in spirit — 
a question, which, in spite of many noble exceptions, some of 
them well known and appreciated by the working-men, I am 
afraid must be answered in the negative. 

I took my MSS. to the Eagle, and wandered out once 
more, instinctively, among those same magnificent trees at the 
back of the colleges, to enjoy the pleasing torment of expecta- 
tion. “ My uncle !” was he the same old man whom I had 
seen at the gallery ; and if so, was Lillian with him ? De- 
licious hope ! And yet, what if she was with him — what to 
me ? But yet I sat silent, dreaming, all the evening, and hur- 
ried early to bed — not to sleep, but to lie and dream on and on, 
and rise almost before light, eat no breakfast, and pace up and 
down, waiting impatiently for the hour at which I was to find 
out -whether my dream’ was true. 

And it was true ! The first object I saw, when I entered 
the room, was Lillian, looking more beautiful than ever. The 
child of sixteen had blossomed into the woman of twenty. 
The ivory and vermillion of the complexion had toned down 
together into still richer hues. The dark hazel eyes shone 
with a more liquid lustre. The figure had become more 
rounded, without losing a line of that fairy lightness, with 
which her light morning-dress, with its delicate French semi- 
tones of color, gay and yet not gaudy, seemed to harmonize. 
The little plump jeweled hands — the transparent chestnut 


142 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


hair, banded round the beautiful oval mask — the tiny feet, 
which, as Suckling has it, 

“Underneath her pettieoat 
Like little mice peeped in and out” — 

I could have fallen down, fool that I was ! and worshiped--* 
what ? I could not tell then, for I can not tell even now. 

The dean smiled recognition, bade me sit down, and dis* 
posed my papers, meditatively, on his knee. 1 obeyed him. 
trembling, choking — my eyes devouring my idol — forgetting 
why I had come — seeing nothing but her — listening for noth- 
ing but the opening of those lips. I believe the dean was 
some sentences deep in his oration, before I became conscious 
thereof. 

“ — And I think I may tell you, at once, that I have 
been very much surprised and gratified with them. They 
evince, on the whole, a far greater acquaintance wdth the 
English classic models, and with the laws of 'rhyme and 
melody, than could have been expected from a young man 
of your class — made virtute 'puer. Have you read any 
Latin 

“ A little.” And I went on staring at Lillian, who looked 
up, furtively, from her work, every now and then, to steal a 
glance at me, and set my poor heart thumping still more 
fiercely against my side. 

“ Very good ; you will have the less trouble, then, in the 
preparation for college. You will find out for yourself, of 
course, the immense disadvantages of self-education. The 
fact is, my dear lord” (turning to Lord Lynedale), “ it is only 
useful as an indication of a capability of being educated by 
others. One never opens a book written by working-men, 
without shuddering at a hundred faults of style. However, 
there are some very tolerable attempts among these — espe 
cially the imitations of Milton’s “ Comus.” 

Poor I had by no means intended them as imitations ; but 
such, no doubt, they were. 

“ I am sorry to see that Shelley has had so much influence 
on your writing. He is a guide as irregular in taste, as un- 
orthodox in doctrine ; though there are some pretty things in 
him now and then. And you have caught his melody toler- 
ably here, now — ” 

“ Oh, that is such a sweet thing !” said Lilian. “ Ho you 
know, I read it over and over last night, and took it up-stairs 
with me. How very fond of beautiful things you must be, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET U3 

Mr. Ijocke, to be able to describe so passionately the longing 
after them ” 

That voice once more ! It intoxicated me, so that I hardly 
knew what I stammered out — something about working-men 
having very few opportunities of indulging the taste for — I 
forget what. I believe I was on the point of running off into 
some absurd compliment, but I caught the dark lady’s warn 
ing eye on me. 

“ Ah, yes ! I forgot. I daresay it must be a very stupid 
life. So little opportunity, as he says. What a pity he is a 
tailor, papa ! Such an unimaginative employment ! How 
delightful it would be to send him to college, and make him 
a clergyman !” 

Fool that I was! I fancied — what did I not fancy] 
Never seeing how that very “Ae” bespoke the indifference — • 
the gulf between us. 1 was not a man — an equal ; but a 
thing — a subject, who was to be talked over, and examined, 
and made into something like themselves, of their supreme 
and undeserved benevolence. 

“ Gently, gently, fair lady ! We must not be as headlong 
as some people would kindly wish to be. If this young man 
really has a proper desire to rise into a higher station, and I 
find him a fit object to be assisted in that praiseworthy ambi- 
tion, why, I think he ought to go to some training college ; 
St. Mark’s, I should say, on the whole, might, by its strong 
Church principles, give the best antidote to any little remain- 
ing taint of sans-culottisrn. You understand me, my lord ? 
And, then, if he distinguished himself there, it would be time 
to think of getting him a sizarship.” 

“ Poor Pegasus in harness !” half smiled, half sighed, the 
dark lady. 

“Just the sort of youth,” whispered Lord Lynedale, loifd 
enough for me to hear, “ to take out with us to the Mediter- 
ranean, as secretary — s’il y avait la de la morale, of course — ” 

Yes — and of course, too, the tailor’s boy was not expected 
to understand French. But the most absurd thing was, how 
every body, except perhaps the dark lady, seemed to take for 
granted that I felt myself exceedingly honored, and must con- 
sider it, as a matter of course, the greatest possible stretch of 
kindness thus to talk me over, and settle every thing for me, 
as if I was not a living soul, but a plant in a pot. Perhaps 
they were not unsupported by experience. I suppose too 
many of us v/ould have thought it so ; there are flunkies in 
all ranks and to spare. Perhaps the true absurdity was the 


144 


ALTON LOCKE, TAIl.OR AND POET. 


way in which I sat, demented, inarticulate, staring at Lillian, 
and only caring for any word which seemed to augur a chance 
of seeing her again ; instead of saying, as I felt, that I had 
no wish whatever to rise above my station ; no intention 
whatever of being sent to training-schools or colleges, or any 
where else at the expense of other people. And therefore it 
was that I submitted blindly, when the dean, who looked as 
kind, and was really, I believe, as kind, as ever was human 
being, turned to me with a solemn authoritative voice — 

“ Well, my young friend, I must say that I am, on the 
whole, very much pleased with your performance. It corrob- 
orates, my dear lord, the assertion, for which I have been so 
often ridiculed, that there are many real men, capable of 
higher things, scattered up and down among the masses. 
Attend to me, sir I” (a hint which I suspect I very much 
wanted). “ Now, recollect ; if it should be hereafter in our 
power to assist your prospects in life, you must give up, once 
and for all, the bitter tone against the higher classes, which I 
am sorry to see in your MSS. As you know more of the 
M^orld, you will find that the poor are not by any means as 
ill-used as they are taught, in these days, to believe. The 
rich have their sorrows too — no one knows it better than I” 
(and he played pensively with his gold pencil case) — “ and 
good and evil are pretty equally distributed -among all ranks, 
by a just and merciful God. I advise you most earnestly, as 
you value your future success in life, to give up reading those 
unprincipled authors, whose aim is to excite the evil passions 
of the multitude ; and to shut your ears betimes to the ex- 
travagant calumnies of demagogues, who make tools of enthu- 
siastic and imaginative minds, for their own selfish aggrand- 
izement. Avoid politics ; the workman has no more to do 
with them than the clergyman. We are told, on divine 
authority, to fear God and the king, and meddle not with 
those who are given to change. Rather put before ypurself 
the example of such a man as the excellent Dr. Brown, one 
of fhe richest and most respected men of the university, with 
whom ]. hope to have the pleasure of dining this evening — 
and yet that man actually, for several years of his life, worked 
at a carpenter’s bench !” 

I too had something to say about all that. I too knew 
something about demagogues and working-men : but the sight 
of Lillian made me a coward ; and I only sat silent as the 
thought flashed across me, half ludicrous, half painful, by its 
contrast, of another who once worked at a carpenter’s bench, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET, 


145 


and fulfilled his mission — not hy an old age of wealth, respect- 
ability, and port wine ; but on the cross of Calvary. After 
all, the worthy old gentleman gave me no time to answer. 

“ Next — I think of showing these MSS. to my publisher, 
to get his opinion as to whether they are worth printing just 
now. Not that I wish you to build much on the chance. It 
is not necessary that you should be a poet. I should prefer 
mathematics for you, as a methodic discipline of the intellect. 
Most active minds write poetry, at a certain age — I wrote a 
good deal, I recollect, myself. But that is no reason for pub- 
lishing. This haste to rush into print is one of the bad signs 
of the times — a symptom of the unhealthy activity which was 
first called out by the French revolution. In the Elizabethan 
age, every decently-educated gentleman was able, as a matter 
of course, to indite a sonnet to his mistress’s eyebrow, or an 
epigram on his enemy ; and yet he never dreamt of printing 
them. One of the few rational things I have met with, 
Eleanor, in the works of your very objectionable pet, Mr. 
Carlyle— though indeed his style is too intolerable to have 
allowed me to read much — is the remark that ‘speech is silver’ 
— ‘silvern’ he calls it pedantically — ‘while silence is golden.’ ” 

At this point of the sermon, Lillian fled from the room, to 
my extreme disgust. But still the old man prosed — 

“ I think, therefore, that you had better stay with your 
cousin for the next week. I hear from Lord Lynedale, that 
he is a very studious, moral, rising young man ; and I only 
hope that you will follow his good example. At the end of 
the week I shall return home, and then I shall be glad to see 

more of you at my house at D , about — miles from this 

place. Good morning.” 

I went, in rapture at the last announcement — and yet my 
conscience smote me. I had not stood up for the working- 
men. I had heard them calumniated, and held my tongue — 
but I was to see Lillian. I had let the dean fancy I was will- 
ing to become a pensioner on his bounty — that I was a mem- 
ber of the Church of England, and willing to go to a Church 
Training School — but I was to see Lillian. I had lowered 
myself in my own eyes — but I had seen Lillian. Perhaps I 
exaggerated rny own oflenses : however that may be, love 
soon silenced conscience, and I almost danced into my cousin’s 
rooms on my return 

That week passed rapidly and happily. I was half amused 
with the change in my coiisin^s demeanor. I had evidently 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Hd 

risen immensely in his eyes : and I could not help applying, 
in my heart, to him, Mr. Carlyle’s dictum about the valet 
species — how they never honor the unaccredited hero, having 
no eye to find him out till properly accredited, and counter- 
signed, and accoutred with full uniform and diploma by that 
great God, Public Opinion. I saw through the motive of his 
new-fledged respect for me — and yet I encouraged it ; for it 
flattered my vanity. The world must forgive me. It was 
something for the poor tailor to find himself somewhat appre- 
ciated at last, even outwardly. And besides, this said respect 
took a form which was very tempting to me now — though the 
week before it was just the one which I should have repelled 
with scorn. George became very anxious to lend me money, 
to order me clothes at his own tailor’s, and set me up in vari- 
ous little toilet refinements, that I might make a respectable 
appearance at the dean’s. I knew that he consulted rather 
the honor of the family, than my good ; but I did not know 
that his aim was also to get me into his power ; and I refused 
more and more weakly at each fresh ofler, and at last consent- 
ed, in an evil hour, to sell my own independence, for the sake of 
indulging my love-dream, and appearing to be what I was not. 

I saw a good deal more of the young university men that 
week. I can not say that my recollections of them were 
pleasant. A few of them were very bigoted Tractarians — 
some of whom seemed to fancy that a dilettante admiration 
for crucifixes and Gothic architecture, was a form of religion, 
which, by its extreme perfection, made the virtues of chastity 
and sobriety quite unnecessary — and the rest, of a more as- 
cetic and moral turn, seemed as narrow, bitter,- flippant, and 
un-earnest young men as I had ever met, dealing in second- 
hand party statements, gathered, as I could discover, entirely 
from periodicals of their own party — taking pride in reading 
nothing but what was made for them, indulging in the most 
violent nick-names and railing, and escaping from any thing 
like severe argument by a sneer or an expression of theatrical 
horror at so “ painful” a notion. I had good opportunities of 
seeing what they were really like ; for my cousin seemed to 
take delight in tormenting them — making them contradict 
themselves, getting them into dilemmas, and putting them 
into passions, while the whole time he professed to be of theii 
party, as indeed he was. But his consciousness of power, and 
his natural craft, seemed to make him consider his own paity 
as his private preserve for sporting over ; and when he ^vas 
tired with the amusement, he used to try to call me in, and 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


147 


feet me by the ears with his guests, which he had no great 
trouble in doing. And then, when he saw me at all coni used, 
or borne down by statements from authors, of whose very 
names I had never heard, or by expressions of horror and sur- 
prise which made me suspect that I had unconsciously com- 
mitted myself to an absurdity, he used to come “hurling into 
the midst of the press,” like some knight at a tournament, or 
Socrates when he saved Alcibiades at Delium, and, by a dex- 
terous repartee, turn the tide of battle, and get me off safe — 
taking care, by-the-by, to hint to me the obligation which he 
considered himself to have conferred upon me. 

But the great majority of the young men whom I met were 
even of a lower stamp. I was utterly shocked and disap- 
pointed at the contempt and unbelief with which they seem- 
ed to regard every thing beyond mere animal enjoyment, and 
here and there the selfish advantage of a good degree. They 
seemed, if one could judge from appearances, to despise 
and disbelieve every thing generous, enthusiastic, enlarged. 
Thoughtfulness was a “bore;” earnestness, “romance.” — 
Above all, they seemed to despise the university itself. The 
“Dons” were “idle, fat old humbugs;” chapel, “a humbug 
too;” tutors, “ humbugs” too, who played into the tradesmen’s 
hands, and charged men high fees for lectures not worth at- 
tending — so that any man who wanted to get on, was forced 
to have a private tutor, besides his college one. The univers- 
ity studies w'ere “ a humbug” — no use to a man in after-life. 
The masters of arts were “humbugs” too; for “they knew 
all the evils, and clamored for reform till they became Dons 
themselves ; and then, as soon as they found the old system 
pay, they settled down on their lees, and grew fat on port 
wine, like those before them.” They seemed to consider 
themselves in an atmosphere of humbug — living in a lie — out 
of which lie-element those who chose were very right in mak- 
ing the most, for the gaining of fame or money. And the 
tone which they took about every thing — the coarseness, hol- 
lowness, Gil Bias selfishness — was just what might have been 
expected. Whether they were right or wrong in their com- 
plaints, I, of course, have no means of accurately knowing. 
But it did seem strange to me, as it has to others, to find in 
the mouths of almost all the gownsmen, those very same 
charges against the universities which, when working-men 
dare°to make them, excite outcries of “ calumny,” “ sedition,” 
“vulgar radicalism,” “attacks on our time-honored institu- 
tions,” &c., &c. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

A CATHEDRAL TOWN. 

At length, the wished-for day had arrived ; and, with my 
cousin, I was whirling along full of hope and desire, toward 

the cathedral town of I) , through a flat fen country, which, 

though I had often heard it described as ugly, struck my im- 
agination much. The vast height and width of the sky-arch, 
as seen from those flats, as- from an ocean — the gray haze 
shrouding the horizon of our narrow land-view, and closing 
us in, till we seemed to be floating through infinite space, on 
a little platform of earth; the rich poplar-fringed farms, with 
their herds of dappled oxen — the luxuriant crops of oats and 
beans — the tender green of the tall rape, a plant till then 
unknown to me — the long, straight, silver dykes, with their 
gaudy carpets of strange floating water plants, and their black 
banks studded with the remains of buried forests — the innum- 
erable draining-mills, with their creaking sails and groaning 
wheels — the endless rows of pollard willows, through which 
the breeze moaned and rung, as through the strings* of some 
vast yEolian harp; the little island knolls in that vast sea 
of fen, each with its long village street, and delicately taper 
spire; all this seemed to me to contain an element of new 
and peculiar beauty. 

“ Why !” exclaims the reading public, if perchance it ever 
secs this tale of mine, in its usual purient longing after any 
thing like personal gossip, or scandalous anecdote, “ why, there 
is no cathedral town which begins with a D ! . Through the 
fen, too ! He must mean either Ely, Lincoln, or Peterborough : 
that’s certain.” Then, at one of those places, they find there 
is a dean — not of the name of Winnstay, true — but his name 
begins with a W ; and he has a pretty daughter — no, a 
niece; well, that’s very near it; it must be him. No-; at 
another place — there is not a dean, true — but a canon, or an 
archdeacon — something of that kind ; and he has a pretty 
daughter, really ; and his name begins not with W, but with 
Y ; well, that’s the last letter of Winnstay, if it is not the 
first ; that must be the poor man ! What a shame to have 
exposed his family secrets in that way !” A.nd then a whole 
circle of myths grow up around the man’s story. It is credi- 
bly ascertained that I am the man who broke into his house 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


149 


last year, after having made love to his housemaid, and stolo 
his writing-desk and plate — else, why should a burglar steal 
family-letters, if he had not some interest in them 1 — And be- 
fore the matter dies away, some worthy old gentleman, wdio 
has not spoken to a w’orking-man since he left his living, 
thirty years ago, and hates a radical as he does the Pope, re- 
ceives two or three anonymous letters, condoling with him 
oil the cruel betrayal of his confidence — base ingratitude for 
undeserved condescension, &c., &c.;-and, perhaps, with an 
inclosure of good advice for his lovely daughter. 

But, wherever D is, we arrived there ; and with a 

beating heart, I — and I now suspect my cousin also — walk- 
ed up the sunny slopes, where the old convent had stood, 
now covered with walled gardens and noble timber trees, and 
crowned by the richly-fretted towers of the cathedral, which 
wo had seen, for the last twenty miles, growing gradu- 
ally larger and more distinct across the level flat. “ Ely 
"No; Lincoln!” "Oh! but really, it’s just as much like 
Peterborough !” Never mind, my dear reader ; the essence 
of the fact, as I think, lies not quite so much in the name of 
the place, as in what was done there — to which I, with all 
the little respect which I can muster, entreat your attention. 

It is not from false shame at my necessary ignorance, but 
from a fear lest I should bore my readers with what seems to 
them trivial, that I refrain from dilating on many a thing, 
which struck me as curious in this my first visit to the house 
of an English ^gentleman. I must say, however, though I 
suppose that it will be numbered, at least, among trite re- 
marks, if not among trivial ones, that the wealth around me 
certainly struck mo, as it has others, as not very much in 
keeping with the office of one who professed to be a minister 
of the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. But I salved over that 
feeling, being desirous to see every thing in the brightest light, 
with the recollection that the dean had a private fortune of 
his own ; though it did seem, at moments, that if a man has 
«iolemnly sworn to devote himself, body and soul, to the cause 
f the spiritual welfare of the nation, that vow might be not 
unfairly construed to include his money, as well as his talents, 
time, and health ; unless, perhaps, money is considered by 
spiritual persons as so worthless a thing, that it is not fit to 
be given to God — a notion which might seem to explain how 
a really pious and universally respected archbishop — living 
within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst infernos of 
destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy — can yet find it in 


150 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


his heart to save £120,000, out of church revenues, and 
leave it to his family ; though it will not explain how Irish 
bishops can reconcile it to their consciences to leave behind 
them, one and all, large fortunes — for I suppose from fifty to 
a hundred thousand pounds is something — saved from fees 
and tithes, taken from the pockets of a Roman Catholic pop- 
ulation, whom they have been put there to convert to Protest- 
antism, for the last three hundred years — with what success, 
all the world knows. Of course, it is a most impertinent, and 
almost a blasphemous thing, for a working-man to daro to 
mention such subjects. Is it not “ speaking evil of dignities ?” 
Strange, by-the-by, that merely to mention facts, without note of 
comment, should be always called “ speaking evil !” Does not 
that argue ill for the facts themselves ? Working-men think 
so ; but what matter what “ the swinish multitude” think ? 

When I speak of wealth, I do not mean that the dean’s 
household would have been considered by his own class at all 
too luxurious. He would have been said, I suppose, to live 
in a “ quiet, comfortable, gentlemanlike way” — “ every thing 
very plain and very good.” It included a butler — a quiet, 
good-natured old man — who ushered us into our bedrooms ; 
a footman, who opened the door — a sort of animal for which 
I have an extreme aversion — young, silly, conceited, over-fed, 
florid — who looked just the man to sell his soul for a livery, 
twice as much food as he needed, and the opportunity of un- 
limited flirtations with the maids ; and a coachman, very like 
other coachmen, whom I saw taking a pair of handsome car- 
riage-horses out to exercise, as w^e opened the gate. 

The old man, silently and as a matter of course, unpacked 
for me my little portmanteau (lent me by my cousin), and 
placed my things neatly in various drawers — went down, 
brought up a jug of hot water, put it on the washing-table — 
told me that dinner was at six — that the half-hour bell rang 
at half-past five — and that, if I wanted any thing, the foot- 
man would answer the bell (bells seeming a prominent idea 
in his theory of the universe) — and so left me, wondering at 
the strange faet that free men, with free wills, do sell them- 
selves, by the hundred thousand, to perform menial offices for 
other men, not for love, but for money ; becoming, to define 
them strictly, bell-answering animals : and are honest, happy, 
contented, in such a life. A man-servant, a soldier, and 'a 
Jesuit, are to me the three great wonders of humanity — three 
forms of moi-al suicide, for which I never had the slightest 
gleam of sympathy, or even comprehension. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND VOET. 


151 


At last we went down to dinner, after my personal adorn- 
ments had been carefully superintended by my cousin, M’^ho 
gave me, over-and-above, various warnings and exhortations 
as to my behavior ; which, of course, took due efi'ect, in 
making me as nervous, constiiained, and affected, as possible. 
When I appeared in the drawing-rom, I was kindly wel- 
comed by the dean, the two ladies, and Lord Lynedale. 

But as I stood fidgeting and blushing, sticking my arms, 
and legs, and head, into all sorts of quaint positions — trying 
one attitude, and thinking it looked awkward, and so exchang- 
ing it for another, more awkward still — my eye fell suddenly 
on a slip of paper, Avhich had conveyed itself, I never knew 
how, upon the pages of the Illustrated Book of Ballads, which 
I was turning over : 

“ Be natural, and you will be gentlemanlike. If you wish 
others to forget your rank, do not forget it yourself. If you 
wish others to remember you with pleasure, forget yourself ; 
and be just what God has made you.” 

I could not help fancying that the lesson, whether inten- 
tionally or not, was meant for me ; and a passing impulse 
made me take up the slip, fold it together, and put it in my 
bosom. Perhaps it was Lillian’s hand-writing ! I looked 
round at the ladies ; but their faces were each buried behind 
a book. 

We went in to dinner ; and to my delight, I sat next to my 
goddess, while opposite me was my cousin. Luckily I had 
got some directions from him as to what to say and do, when 
my wonders, the servants, thrust eatables and drinkables over 
my shoulders. 

Lillian and my cousin chatted away about church-archi- 
tecture, and the restorations which were going on at the cathe- 
dral ; w'hile I, for the first-half of dinner, feasted my eyes with 
the sight of a beauty, in which I seemed to discover every 
moment some new excellence. Every time I looked up at 
her, my eyes dazzled, my face burnt, my heart sank, and soft 
thrills ran through every nerve. And yet, Heaven knows, 
my emotions were as pure as those of an infant. It was 
beauty longed for, and found at last, which I adored as a 
hing not to be, possessed, but worshiped. The desire, even 
the thought, of calling her my own, never crossed my mind. 
I felt that I could gladly die, if by death I could purchase 
the permission to watch her. I understood, then, and forever 
after, the pure devotion of the old knights and troubadours of 
chivalry 1 seemed to myself to be their brother — one of the 


152 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 

holy guild of poet-lovers. I was a new Petrarch, basking in 
the light-rays of a new Laura. I gazed, and gazed, and found 
new life in gazing, and was content. 

But my simple bliss was perfected, when she suddenly 
turned to me, and began asking me questions on the very 
points on which I was best able to answer. She talked about 
poetry, Tennyson and Wordsworth ; asked me if I understood 
Browning’s Bordello ; and then comforted me, after my stam- 
mering confession that I did not, by telling me she was de- 
lighted to hear that ; for she did not understand it either, and 
it was so pleasant to have a companion in ignorance. Then 
she asked, if I was much struck with the buildings in Cam- 
bridge ? — rhad they inspired me with any verses yet ? — I was 
bound to write something about them — and so on ; making the 
most commonplace remarks look brilliant, from the ease and 
liveliness with which they were spoken, and the tact with which 
they W'ere made pleasant to the listener : while I wondered at 
myself, for enjoying from her lips the flippant, sparkling tattle, 
which had hitherto made young women to me objects of un- 
speakable dread, to be escaped by crossing the street, hiding be- 
hind doors, and rushing blindly into back-yards and coal-holes. 

The ladies left the room : and I, with Lillian’s face glow- 
ing bright in my imagination, as the crimson orb remains on 
the retina of the closed eye, after looking intently at the sun; 
sat listening to a pleasant discussion between the dean and 
the nobleman, about some country in the East, which they 
had both visited, and greedily devouring all the new facts 
which they incidentally brought forth out of the treasures of 
their highly-cultivated minds. 

I was agreeably surprised (don’t laugh, reader) to find that 
I was allowed to drink water ; and that the other men drank 
not more than a glass or two of wine, after the ladies had re- 
tired. I had, somehow, got both lords and deans associated 
in my mind with infinite swillings of port wine, and bacchan- 
alian orgies, and sat down, at first, in much fear and trem- 
bling, lest I should be compelled to join, under penalties of 
salt-and-water ; but I had made up my mind, stoutly, to bear 
any thing rather than get drunk ; and so I had all the merit 
of a temperance-martyr, without any of its disagreeables. 

“ Well,” said I to myself, smiling in spirit, “ what would 
my Chartist friends say if they saw me here ] Not even 
Crossthwaite himself could find a flaw in the appreciation of 
merit for its own sake, the courtesy and condescension — ah! 
but he would complain of it, simply for being condescension.*^ 


I 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 153 

But, alter all, what else could it be? Were not these men 
more experienced, more learned, older than myself? They 
were my superiors ; it was in vain for me to attempt to hide 
it from myself. But the wonder was, that they themselves 
w'ere the ones to appear utterly unconscious of it. They treat- 
ed me as an equal ; they welcomed me — the young viscount 
and the learned dean — on the broad ground of a common hu- 
manity ; as I believe hundreds more of their class would do, 
if we did not ourselves take a pride in estranging them from 
us — telling them that fraternization between our classes is 
impossible, and then cursing them for not fraternizing with 
us. But of that, more hereafter. 

At all events, now my bliss was perfect. No ! I was wrong 
— a higher enjoyment than all awaited me, when, going into 
the drawing-room, I found Lillian singing at the piano. I had 
no idea that music was capable of expressing and conveying 
emotions so intense and ennobling. My experience was confined 
to street-music, and to the bawling at the chapel. And, as yet, 
Mr. Hullah had not risen into a power more enviable than that 
of kings, and given to every workman a free entrance into the 
magic world of harmony and melody, where he may prove his 
brotherhood with Mozart and Weber, Beethoven and Men- 
delssohn. Great unconscious demagogue ! — leader of the peo- 
ple, and laborer in the cau-se of divine equality ! — thy reward 
is with the Father of the people ! 

The luscious softness of the Italian airs overcame me with 
a delicious enervation. Every note, every interval, each shade 
of 'expres.sion spoke to me — I knew not what : and yet they 
spoke to my heart of hearts. A spirit out of the infinite 
heaven seemed calling to my spirit, which longed to answer 
— and was dumb — and could only vent itself in tears, which 
welled unconsciously forth, and eased my heart from the pain 
ful tension of excitement. 

* * * . . * . - 
Her voice is hovering o’er my soul — it lingers, 
O’ershadowing it with soft and thrilling wings j 
The blood and life within those snowy fingers 
Teach witchcraft to the instrumental strings 
My brain is wild, my breath comes quick, 

The blood is listening in my frame ; 

And thronging shadows, fast and quick. 

Fall on my overflowing eyes. 

My heart is quivering like a name ; 

As morning-dew that in the sunbeam dies, 

I am dissolved in these consuming ecstasies. 

♦ * * # 


154. , 9 ALTOxN LOCKE, TATLOR AND POET 

The dark lady, Miss Staunton, as I ought to call her, saw 
my emotion, and, as I thought unkindly, checked the cause 
of it at once' 

“ Pray do not give us any more of those die-away Italian 
airs, Lillian. Sing something manful, German or English, or 
any thing you like, except those sentimental wailings.” 

Lillian stopped, took another book, and commenced, after 
a short prelude, one of my own songs. Surprise and pleasure 
overpowered me more utterly than the soft southern melodies 
had done. I was on the point of springing up and leaving 
the room, when my raptures were checked by our host, who 
turned round, and stopped short in an oration on the geology 
of Upper Egypt. 

What’s that about brotherhood and freedom, Lillian V 
W^e don’t want any thing of that kind here.” 

“ It’s only a popular London song, papa,” answered she 
with an arch smile. 

“ Or likely to become so,” added Miss Staunton, in her 
marked dogmatic tone. 

“ I’m very sorry for London, then.” And he turned to 
the deserts, 


CHAPTER XV. 


THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 

Ai'ter breakfast the next morning, Lillian retired, saying 
laughingly, that she must go and see after her clothing-club 
and her dear old women at the almshouse, which, of course, 
made me look on her as more an angel than ever. And 
while George was left with Lord Lynedale, I was summoned 
to a private conference with the dean in his study. 

I found him in a room lined with cabinets of curiosities, 
and hung all over with strange horns, bones and slabs of fos- 
sils. But I was not allowed much time to look about me ; 
for he commenced at once on the subject of my studies, by 
asking me whether I was willing to prepare myself for the 
university by entering on the study of mathematics t 

I felt so intense a repugnance to them, that at the risk of 
ofiending him — perhaps, for aught I knew, fatally- -T dared 
to demur. He smiled : 

“ I am convinced, young man, that even if you intended to 
follow poetry as a profession — and a very poor one you will 
find it — yet you will never attain to any excellence therein, 
without far stricter mental discipline than any to which you 
have been accustomed. That is why I abominate our mod 
ern poets. They talk about the glory of the poetic vocation, 
as if they intended to be kings and world-makers, and all the 
while they indulge themselves in the most loose and desultory 
habits of thought. Sir, if they really believed their own gran- 
diloquent assumptions, they would feel that the responsibility 
of their mental training was greater, not loss, than any one’s 
else. Like the Quakers, they fancy that they honor inspira- 
tion by supposing it to be only extraordinary and paroxysrnic : 
the true poet, like the rational Christian, believing that in- 
spiration is continual and orderly, that it reveals harmonious 
laws, not merely excites sudden emotions. You understand 
me ?” 

1 did, tolerably ; and. subsequent conversations with him 
fixed the thoughts sufficiently in my mind, to make me pretty 
sure that I am giving a faithful verbal transcript of them. 

“ You must study some science. Have you read any logic V’ 

T. mentioned Watts’ “Logic,” and Locke “On the use 


156 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POE'I. 

of the Understanding” — two hooks well known to reading 
artisans. 

“ Ah,” he said ; “ such books are very well, but they are 
merely popular. ‘ Aristotle,’ ‘ Ritter on Induction,’ and 
Kant’s ‘Prolegomena’ and ‘Logic’ — when you had read them 
some seven or eight times over, you might consider yoursell 
as knowing somewhat about the matter.” 

“ I have read a little about induction in Whately.” 

“ Ah — very good book, but popular. Did you find that 
your method of thought received any benefit from it ?” 

“ The truth is — I do not know whether I can .quite express 
myself clearly — but logic, like mathematics, seems to tell me 
too little about things. It does not enlarge my knowledge 
of man or nature ; and those are what I thirst for. And you 
must remember — I hope I am not wrong in saying it — that 
the case of a man of your class, who has the power of travel- 
ing, of reading- what he will, and seeing what he will, is very 
different from that of an artisan, whose chances of observa- 
tion are so sadly limited. You must forgive us, if we are un- 
willing to spend our time over books which tell us nothing 
about the great universe outside the shop- windows.” 

He smiled compassionately. “ Very true, my boy. There 
are two branches of study, then, before you, and by eiilier of 
them a competent subsistence is possible, with good interest. 
Philology is one. But before you could arrive at those depths 
in it w'hich connect with ethnology, history, and geography, 
you would require a lifetime of study. There remains yet 
another. I see you stealing glances at those natural curiosi- 
ties. In the study of them, you would find, as I believe more 
and more daily, a mental discipline superior even to that 
which language or mathematics give If I had been blest 
with a son— but that is neither here nor there — it was my 
intention to have educated him almost entirely as a natural- 
ist. I think I should like to try the experiment on a young 
man like yourself.” 

Sandy Mackaye’s definition of legislation for the masses, 
“ Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,” rose up in my thoughts, 
and, half unconsciously, passed my lips. The good old man 
only smiled. 

“ That is not my reason, Mr. Locke. I should choose, by 
preference, a man of your class for experiments, not because 
the nature is coarser, or less precious in the scale of creation, 
but because I have a notion, for which, like many others, 1 
have been very much laughed at, .that you are less sophisti 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 157 

cated,’more simple and fresh from nature’s laboratory, than 
the young persons of the upper classes, who begin from the 
nursery to be more or less trimmed up, and painted over by 
the artificial state of society — a very excellent state, mind, 
Mr. Locke. Civilization is, next to Christianity of course, the 
highest blessing ; but not so good a state for trying anthropo- 
logical experiments on.’* 

I assured him of my great desire to be the subject of such 
an experiment ; and was encouraged by his smile to tell him 
something about my intense love for natural objects, the mys- 
terious pleasure which I had taken, from my boyhood, in trying 
to classify them, and my visits to the British Museum, for 
the purpose of getting at some general knowledge of the nat- 
ural groups. 

“Excellent,” he said, “young man; the very best sign I 
have yet seen in you. And what have you read on these 
subjects I” I mentioned several books : Bingley, Bewick, 
“ Humboldt’s Travels,”,” “ The Voyage of the JBeagle,” vari- 
ous scattered articles in the Penny and Saturday Maga- 
zines, &c., &c. 

“ Ah 1” he said, “ popular — you will find, if you will allow 
me to give you my experience — ” 

I assured him that I was only too much honored — and ] 
truly felt so. 1 knew myself to be in the presenee of my 
rightful superior — my master on that very point of education 
which I idolized. Every sentence which he spoke gave me 
fresh light on some matter or other ; and I felt a worship for 
him, totally irrespective of any vulgar and slavish respect for 
his rank or wealth. The working-man has no want for real 
reverence. Mr. Carlyle’s being a “ gentleman,” has not in- 
jured his influen(.e with the people. On the contrary, it is 
the artisan’s intense longing to find his real lords and guides, 
which makes him despise and execrate his sham ones 
Whereof let society take note. 

“Then,” continued he, “ your plan is to take up some one 
section of the subject, and thoroughly exhaust that. Univer- 
sal laws manifest themselves only by particular instances. 
They say, man is the microcosm, Mr. Locke ; but the man 
.^f science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its 
way. It exemplifies, directly or indirectly, every physical law 
in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is 
not only a part, hut a mirror^ of the great whole. It has a 
definite relation to the whole world, and the whole world has 
a relation to it. Pweally, by-the-by, I can not give you a bet 


158 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


ter instance of what T mean, tlian in my little diatribe on the 
Geryon Trifurcifer, a small reptile which I found, some years 
ago, inhabiting the mud of the salt-lakes of Balkhan, which 
fills up a long-desired link between the Chelonia and the 
Perenni branchiate Batrachians, and, as I think, though Pro- 
fessor Brown difiers from me, connects both with the Herb- 
ivorous Cetacea. Professor Brown is an exceedingly talented 
man, but a little too cautious in accepting any one’s theo- 
ries but his own. There it is,” he said, as he drew out of a 
drawer a little pamphlet of some thirty pages — “ an old man’s 
darling. I consider that book the outcome of thirteen years’ 
labor.” 

“It must be very deep,” I replied, “to have been worth 
such long-continued study.” 

“ Oh ! science is her own reward. There is hardly a great 
physical law which I have not brought to bear on the subject 
of that one small animal ; and above all — what is in itself 
worth a life’s labor — I have, I believe, discovered two entirely 
new laws of my own, though one of them, by-the-by, has been 
broached by Professor Brown since, in his lectures. He might 
have mentioned my name in connection with the subject, for 
I certainly imparted my ideas to him, two years at least be- 
fore the delivery of those lectures of his. Professor Brown is 
a very great man, certainly, and a very good man, but not 
quite so original as is generally supposed. Still, a scientific 
man must expect his little disappointments and injustices. If 
you were behind the scenes in the scientific world, I can as- 
sure you, you would find as much party-spirit, and unfairness, 
and jealousy, and emulation there, as any where else. Human 
nature, human nature, every where !” 

I said nothing, but thought the more ; and took the book, 
promising to study it carefully. 

“ There is Cuvier’s ‘ Animal Kingdom,’ and a dictionary 
of scientific terms to help you ; and mind, it must be got up 
thoroughly, for I purpose to set you an examination or two in 
it, a few days hence. Then I shall find out whether you know 
what is worth all the information in the world.” 

“ What is that, sir!” 

“ The art of getting information — artem discendi, Mr. 
Locke, wherewith the world is badly provided just now, as it 
is overstocked with the artem legendi — the knack of running 
the eye over books, and fancying that it understands them, 
because it can talk about them. You can not play that trick 
with my Geryon Trifurcifer, I assure you ; he is a.s dry and 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


tough, as his name. But, believe me, he is worth mastering, 
not because he is mine, but simply because he is tough.” 

I promised all diligence. 

“ Very good. And be sure, if you intend to be a poet foi 
these days (and I really think you have some faculty for it), 
you must become a scientific man. Science has made vast 
strides, and introduced entirely new modes of looking at na- 
ture ; and poets must live up to the age. I never read a word 
of Goethe’s verse, but I am convinced that he must be the 
great poet of the day; just because he is the only one who 
has taken the trouble to go into the details of practical science. 
And, in the mean time, I will give you a lesson myself I 
see you are longing to know the contents of these cabinets. 
You shall assist me, by writing out the names of this lot of 
shells, just come from Australia, which I am now going to 
arrange.” 

“1 set to work -at once, under his directions, and passed 
that morning, and the two or three following, delightfully. 
But I question whether the good dean would have been well 
satisfied, had he known how all his scientific teaching con 
firmed my democratic opinions. The mere fact, that I could 
understand these things when they were set before me, as 
well as any one else, was to me a siirnde demonstration of the 
equality in worth, and therefore in privilege, of all classes 
It may be answered, that I had no right to argue from my- 
self to' the mob ; and that other working geniuses have no 
right to demand universal enfranchisement for their whole 
class, just because they, the exceptions, are fit for it. But 
surely it is hard to call such an error, if it be one, “ the inso- 
lent assumption of democratic conceit,” &c., &c. Does it not 
look more like the humility of men who are unwilling to 
assert for themselves peculiar excellence, peculiar privileges ; 
who, like the apostles of old, want no glory, save that which 
they can not share with the outcast and the slave ? Let 
society, among other matters, take note of that. 


V 


CHAPTER ‘XVI. 

CULTIVATED WOMEN. 

I WA 3 thus brought in contact, for the first time in my life, 
w^ith two exquisite specimens of cultivated womanhood ; and 
they naturally, as the reader may well suppose, almost en- 
tirely engrossed my thoughts and interest. 

Lillian, for so I must call her, became daily more and more 
agreeable ; and tried, as I fancied, to draw me out, and show 
me oil" to the best advantage ; whether from the desire of 
pleasing herself, or pleasing me, I know not, and do not wish 
to know — but the consequences to my boyish vanity were 
such as are more easy to imagine, than pleasant to describe. 
Miss Staunton, on the other hand, became, I thought, more 
and more unpleasant ; not that she ever, for a moment, out- 
stepped the bounds of the most perfect courtesy ; but her 
manner, which was soft to no one except to Lord Lynedalej 
was, when she spoke to me, especially dictatorial and abrupt. 
She seemed to make a point of carping at chance words of 
mine, and of setting me down suddenly, by breaking in with 
some severe, pithy observation, on conversations to which she 
had been listening unobserved. * She seemed, too, to view 
with dislike any thing like cordiality between me and Lillian 
— a dislike, which I was actually at moments vain enough 
(such a creature is man !) to attribute to — jealousy 1 1 ! till 1 
began to suspect and hate her, as a proud, harsh, and exclu- 
sive aristocrat. And my suspicion and hatred received their 
'confirmation, when, one morning, after an evening even more 
charming than usual, Lillian came down, reserved, peevish, 
all but sulky, and showed that that bright heaven of sunny 
features had room in it for a cloud, and that an ugly one. 
But I, poor fool, only pitied -her ; made up my mind that 
some one had ill-used her ; and looked on her as a martyr — 
perhaps to that harsh' cousin of hers. 

That day was taken up with writing out answers to the 
dean’s searching questions on his pamphlet, in which, 1 be- 
lieve, I acquitted myself tolerably ; and he seemed far more 
satisfied with my commentary, than I was with his text. 

He seemed to ignore utterly any thing like religion, or even 
the very notion of God, in his chains of argument. Nature 
was spoken of as the wilier and producer of all the marvels 
which he described ; and every word in the book, to mv 

• i 

’ -vV. ' . ■ i 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. IGI 

# 

astonishment, might have been written, just as easily, by an 
Atheist, as by a dignitary of the Church of England. 

I could not help, that evening, hinting this defect, as deli- 
cately as I could, to my good host, and was somewhat sur- 
prised to find that he did not consider it a defect at all. 

“ I am in nowise anxious to weaken the antithesis between 
natural and revealed religion. Science may help the former, 
but it has absolutely nothing to do with the latter. She 
stands on her own ground, has her own laws, and is her own 
reward. Christianity is a matter of faith ^nd of the teaching 
of the Church. It must not go out of its way for science, 
and science must not go out of her way for it ; and where 
they seem to differ, it is our duty to believe that they are 
reconcilable by fuller knowledge, but not to clip truth in order 
to make it match with doctrine.” 

“ Mr. Carlyle,” said Miss Staunton, in her abrupt way, 
“ can see that the God of Nature is the God of man ” 

“ Nobody denies that, my dear.” 

“ Except in every word and action ; else why do they not 
write about Nature as if it was the expression of a living, 
loving spirit, not merely a dead machine 1” 

“It may be very easy, my dear, for a Deist like Mr. Car- 
lyle to see his God in Nature ; but if he would accept the 
truths of Christianity, he would find that there were deeper 
mysteries in them than trees and animals can explain.” 

“ Pardon me, sir,” I said, “ but I think that a very large 
portion of thoughtful working-men agree with you, though, 
in their case, that opinion has only increased their difficulties 
about Christianity. They complain that they can not iden- 
tify the God of the Bible with the God of the world around 
them ; and one of their great complaints against Christianity 
is, that it demands assent to mysteries which are independent 
of, and even contradictory to the laws of Nature. 

The old man was silent. 

“Mr. Carlyle is no Deist,” said Miss Staunton ;“ and I 
am sure, that unless the truths of Christianity contrive soon 
to get themselves justified by the laws of science, the higher 
orders will believe in them as little as Mr. Locke informs us 
that the working classes do.” 

“ You prophesy confidently, my darling.” 

“ Oh, Eleanor is in one of her prophetic moods to-night,’ 
said Lillian, slyly. “ She has been foretelling me I know not 
what misery and misfortune, just because I choose to amuse 
myself in my own way.” 

And she gave another 81}% pouting look at Eleanor, and 


182 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

then ealled me to loalc over some engravings, chatting over 
them so charmingly! — and stealing, every now and then, a 
pretty, saucy look at her cousin, which seemed to say, “I shall 
do what I like, in spite of your predictions.” 

This confirmed my suspicions that Eleanor had been trying 
to separate us ; and the suspicion received a further corrobo- 
ration, indirect and perhaps very unfair, from the lecture which 
I got from my cousin, after I went up-stairs. 

He had been flattering me very much lately about “ the 
impression” I was making on the family, and tormenting me 
by compliments on the clever way in M^hich I “played my 
cards and when I denied indignantly any such intention, 
patting me on the back, and laughing me down in a knowing 
way, as much as to say, that he was not to be taken in by my 
professions of simplicity. He seemed to j udge every one by him- 
self, and to have no notion of any middle characters, between 
the mere greenhorn and deliberate schemer. But to-night, 
after commencing with the usual compliments, he went on : 

“ Now, first let me give you one hint, and be thankful for 
it. Mind 5 ’^our game with that Eleanor — Miss Staunton 
She is a regular tyrant, I happen to know; a strong-minded 
woman with a vengeance. She manages every one here ; and 
unless you are in her good books, don’t expect to keep your 
footing in this house, my boy. So just mind and pay her a 
little more attention and Miss Lillian a little less. After all, 
it is worth the trouble. She is uncommonly well read ; and 
says confounded clever things, too, when she wakes up out of 
the sulks; and you may pick up a wrinkle or two from her, 
worth pocketing. You mind what she says to you. You 
know she is going to be married to Lord Lynedale ?” 

I nodded assent. 

“Well then, if you want to hook him, you must secure her 
first.” 

“ I want to hook no one, George ; I have told you that a 
thousand times.” 

“ Oh, no ! certainly not; by no means ! Why should you]” 
said the artful dodger. And he swung, laughing, out of the 
room, leaving in my mind a strange suspicion, of which I 
was ashamed, though I could not shake it oft’, that he had 
remarked Eleanor’s wish to cool my admiration for Lillian, 
and was willing, for some purpose of his own to further that 
wish. The truth is, I had very little respect for him, or trust 
in him ; and I was learning to look, habitually, for some selfish 
motive m all he said or did. Perhaps, if 1 had acted more 
boldlv upon what I did see, \ should not have been here now 


CHAPTER XVII. 


SERMONS AND STONES. 

The next afternoon was the last but one of my stay at 
D W') were to dine late, after sunset, and, before din- 

ner, we went into the cathedral. The choir had just finished 
practicing. Certain exceedingly ill-looking men, whose faces 
bespoke principally sensuality and self-conceit, and whose func- 
tion was that of praising God, on the sole qualification of good 
bass and tenor voices, were coming chattering through the 
choir gates; and behind them, a group of small boys were 
suddenly transforming themselves from angels into sinners, by 
tearing off their white surplices, and pinching and poking* each 
other noisily as they passed us, with as little reverence as 
Voltaire himself could have desired. 

I had often been in the cathedral before — indeed, we at- 
tended the service daily, and I had been appalled, rather than 
astonished by what I saw and heard ; the unintelligible ser- 
vice — the irreverent gabble of the choristers and readers — the 
scanty congregation — the meagre portion of the vast building 
which seemed to be turned to any use : but never more than 
that evening, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, 
of that vast desert nave, with its aisles and transepts — built 
for some purpose or other now extinct. The whole place 
seemed to crush and sadden me ; and I could not re-echo Lil- 
lian’s remark : 

“ How those pillars, rising story above story, and those 
lines of pointed arches, all lead the eye heavenward ! It is a 
beautiful notion, that about pointed architecture being sym- 
bolic of Christianity.” 

“ I ought to be very much ashamed of my stupidity,” I 
answered ; “but I can not feel that, though I believe I ought 
to do so. That vast groined roof, with its enormous weight 
of hanging stone, seems to crush one — to bar out the free sky 
above. Those painted windows, too — »how gloriously the 
western sun is streaming through them ! but their rich hues 
only dim and deface his light. I can feel what you say, 
when I look at the cathedral on the outside ; there, indeed, 
every line sweeps the eye upward — carries it from one pinnacle 
to another, each with less and less standing-ground, till at 
the summit the building gradually vanishes in a point, and 


164 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


leaves the spirit to wing its way unsupported and alone iniu 
the ether. Perhaps,” I added, half bitterly, “these cathedrals 
may he true symbols of the superstition which created them — 
on the outside, offering to enfranchise the soul and raise it up 
to heaven ; hut when the dupes had entered, giving them only 
a dark prison, and a crushing bondage, which neither we nor 
our fathers have been able to bear.” 

“ You may sneer at them, if you will, Mr. Locke,” said 
Eleanor, in her severe, abrupt way. “The -working classes 
would have been badly off without them. They were, in 
their day^ the only democratic institution in the w’orld ; and 
the only socialist one, two. The only chance a poor man had 
of rising by his worth, w^as by coming to the monasteiy. And 
bitterly the working classes felt the want of them, when they 
fell. Your own Cobbett can tell you that.” 

“ Ah !” said Lillian, “ how different it mast have been four 
hundred years ago ! — how solemn and picturesque those old 
monks must have looked, gliding about the aisles ! — and how 
magnificent the choir must have been, before all the glass 

and carving, and that beautiful shrine of St. , blazing, 

with gold and je-wels, w'ere all plundered and defaced by those 
'horrid Puritans'.” 

“Say, refoimer-squires,” answered Eleanor; “for it was 
they who did the thing ; only it was found convenient, at the 
Restoration, to lay on the people of the 17th century the in- 
iquities which the country gentlemen committed in the 16th.” 

“ Surely,” I added, emboldened by her w'ords, “ if the 
monasteries were what their admirers say, some method of 
restoring the good of the old system, without its evil, ought 
to be found ; and would be found, if it were not — ” I paused, 
recollecting whose guest I -was. 

“ If it w'ere not, I suppose,” said Eleanor, “ for those lazy, 
overfed, bigoted hypocrites, the clergy. That, I presume, is 
the description of them to which you have been most accus- 
tomed. Now, let me ask you one question. • Do you mean to 
condemn, just now, the Church as it w’as, or the Church as it 
is, or the Church as it ought to hel Radicals have a habit 
of confusing those three questions, as they have of confusing 
other things when it suits them.” 

“ Really,” I said — for my blood w'as rising — “ I do think 
that, with the confessed enormous wealth of the clergy, the 
cathedral establishments especially, they might do more for 
the people.” 

' “ Listen to me a little, Mr. Locke. The laity nowadays 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND; POET, 1G5 

take a pride in speaking evil of the clergy, never seeing th.al 
it they are bad, the laity have made them so. VV^hy, what 
do you impute to them] Their worldliness, their being like 
the world, like the laity round them — like you, in short ? 
Improve yourselves, and by so doing, if there is this sad 
tendency in the clergy to imitate you, you will mend them ; 
it you do not find that, after all, it is they .who will have to 
mend you. ‘As with the people, so with the priest,’ is the 
everlasting law. When, fifty years ago, all classes were 
drunkards, from the statesman to the peasant, the clergy 
were drunken also, hut not half as bad as the laity. Now 
the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambition ; and^ 
the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half as bad 
as the laity. The laity, and you working-men especially, are 
the dupes of frothy, insincere, official rant, as Mr. Carlyle 
would call it, in Parliament, on the hustings, at every debat- 
ing society and Chartist meeting ; and therefore the clergy- 
men’s sermons are apt to be just what people like elsewhere, 
and what, therefore, they suppose people will like there.” 

“ If then,” I answered, “ in spite of your opinions, you 
confess the clergy to be so bad, why are you so angry with 
men of our opinions, if we do plot sometimes a little against 
the Church ?” 

“ I do not think you know what my opinions are, Mr. 
Locke. Did you not hear me just now praising the monas- 
teries, because they were socialist and democratic ? But why 
is the badness of the clergy any reason for pulling down the 
Church 1 That is another of the confused irrationalities into 
which you all allow yourselves to fall. What do you mean 
by crying shame on a man for being a bad clergyman, if a 
good clergyman is not a good thing ? If the very idea of a 
clergyman was abominable, as your Church-destroyers ought 
to say, you ought to praise a man for being a bad one, and 
not acting out this same abominable idea of priesthood. Your 
very outcry against the sins of the clergy shows that, even in 
your minds, a dim notion lies somewhere that a clergyman’s 
vocation is, in itself, a divine, a holy, a beneficent one.” 

“ I never looked at it in that light, certainly,” said I, some- 
what staggered. 

“ Very likely not. One word more, for I may not have 
another opportunity of speaking to you as I w^ould on these 
matters. You working-men complain of the clergy for being 
bigoted and obscurantist, and hating the cause of the people. 
Does not nine-tenths of the blame of that lie at your door ? 1 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


ifi6 

took up, the other day, at hazard, one of 3’^our favorite liberty 
preaehing newspapers ; and f saw books advertised in it, whose 
names no modest woman should ever behold ; doctrines and 
practices advocated in it, from which all the honesty, the 
decency, the common human feeling which is left in the 
English mind, ought to revolt, and does revolt. You can not 
deny it. Your class has told the world that the cause of 
liberty, equality, and fraternity, the cause which the working 
masses claim as theirs, identifies itself with blasphemy and in- 
decency, with the tyrannous persecutions of trades-unions, with 
obbery, assa.ssination, vitriol- bottles, and midnight incendiar- 
ism. And then 3^ou curse the clergy for taking you at your 
word ? Whatsoever they do, you attack them. If they 
believe you, and stand up for common morality, and for the 
truths which they know are all-important to poor as well as 
rich, 3"ou call them bigots and persecutors ; while if they 
neglect, in any way, the very Christianity for believing which 
you insult them, you turn round and call them hypocrites. 
Mark my words, Mr. Locke, till you gain the respect and 
confidence of the clergy, you will never rise. The day will 
come when you will find that the clergy are the only class 
who can help you. Ah, you may shake your head. I warn 
you of it. They were the only bulwark of the poor against 
the mediaeval tyranny of Rank ; you will find them the only 
bulwark against the modern tyranny of Mammon.” 

I was on the point of entreating her to explain herself 
further, but at that critical moment Lillian interposed. 

“ Now, stay your prophetic glances into the future ; here 
come Lynedale and papa.” And in a moment, Eleanor’s whole 
manner and countenance altered — the petulant, wild unrest, 
the harsh dictatorial tone vanished ; and she turned to meet 
her lover with a look of tender, satisfied devotion, which trans- 
figured her whole face. It was most strange, the power he 
had over her. His presence, even at a distance, seemed to 
fill her whole being with rich, quiet life. She watched him 
with folded hands, like a mystic worsh^ier, waiting for the 
afflatus of the spirit ; and, suspicious and angry as I felt 
toward her, I could not help being drawn to her by this reve- 
lation of depths of strong healthy feeling, of which her usual 
manner gave so little sign. 

This conversation thoroughly puzzled me ; it showed me 
that there might be two sides to the question of the people’s 
cause, as well as to that of others. It shook a little my faith 
in the infallibility of my own class, to hear such severe ani- 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


167 


inad versions on them, from a person who professed herself as 
much a disciple of Carlyle as any working-man, and who 
evidently had no lack, either of intellect to comprehend, or 
boldness to speak out his doctrines ; who could praise the old 
monasteries for being democratic and socialist, and spoke far 
more severely of the clergy than I could have done — because 
she did not deal merely in trite words of abuse, but showed a 
real analytic insight into the causes of their short-coming. 

That same evening, the conversation happened to turn on 
dress, of which Miss Staunton spoke scornfully and disparag- 
ingly, as mere useless vanity and frippery — an empty substi- 
tute for real beauty of person as w'ell as the higher beauty of 
mind. And I, emboldened by the courtesy with which I was 
always called on to take my share in every thing that was 
said or done, ventured to object, humbly enough, to her 
notions, 

“ But is not beauty,” 1 said, “ in itself a good and blessed 
thing, softening, refining, rejoicing the eyes of all who behold ?” 
(and my eyes, as I spoke, involuntarily rested on Lillian’s 
face — who saw it, and blushed.) “ Surely nothing which helps 
beauty is to be despised. And, without the charms -of dress, 
beauty, even that of expression, does not really do itself justice. 
How many lovely and lovable faces there are, for instance, 
among the working classes, which, if they had but the advant- 
ages which ladies possess, might create delight, respect, chiv- 
alrous worship, in the beholder — but are now never appre- 
ciated, because they have not the same fair means of display- 
ing themselves which even the savage girl of the South Sea 
Islands possesses !” 

Lillian said it was so very true — she had really never 
thought of it before, and, somehow, I gained coiirage to go on. 

“ Besides, dress is a sort of sacrament, if I may use the 
■word — a sure sign of the wearer’s character ; according as any 
one is orderly, or modest, or tasteful, or joyous, or brilliant” 
— and I glanced again at Lillian — “those excellences, or the 
want of them, are sure to show themselves, in the colors they 
choose, and the cut of their garments. In the workroom, 1 
and a friend of mine used often to amuse ourselves over the 
clothes we were making, by speculating from them on the 
sort of people the wearers were to be ; and I fancy we were 
not often wrong.” 

My cousin looked daggers at me, and for a moment 1 
fancied I had committed a dreadful mistake in mentioning my 


168 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


tailor-life. So I had in his eyes, but not in those of the really 
well-bred persons round me. ^ 

“ Oh, how very amusing it must have been ! I think' I 
shall turn milliner, Eleanor, for the fun of divining every 
one’s little failings from their caps and gowns !” . . : 

, “Go on, Mr. Locke,” said the dean, who- had seemed 
buried in the “ Transactions of the Eoyal Society.” “ The 
fact is novel, and I am more obliged to any one who gives 
me that, than if he gave me a bank-note. The money gets 
spent and done with ; but I can not spend the fact ; it re- 
mains for life as permanent capital, returning interest and 
compound-interest ad infinitum. By-the-by, tell me^ about 
those same workshops. I have heard more about them than 
I like to believe tnie.” 

And I did tell him all about them ; and spoke, my blood 
rising as I went on, long and earnestly, perhaps eloquently. 
Now and then I got abashed, and tried to stop ; and then the 
dean informed me that I was speaking w’^ell and sensibly ; 
while Lillian entreated me to go on. She had never con- 
ceived such things possible — it was as interesting as a novel, 
&e., &c.; and Miss Staunton sat with compressed lips and 
frowning brow, apparently thinking of nothing but her book, 
till I felt quite angry at her apathy — for such it seemed to 
me to be. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 


MY FALL. 

And now the last day of our stay at D had arrived 

and I had as yet heard nothing of the prospects of my book ; 
though indeed, the company in which I had found myself had 
driven literary ambition, for the time being, out of my head, 
and bewitched me to float down the stream of daily circum- 
stance, satisfied to snatch the enjoyment of each present mo- 
ment. That morning, however, after I had fulfilled my daily 
task of arranging and naming objects of natural history, the 
dean settled himself back in his arm-chair, and bidding me 
sit down, evidently meditated a business-conversation. 

He had heard from his publisher, and read his letter to me. 
“ The poems were on the whole much liked. The most sat- 
isfactory method of publishing for all parties, would be by 
procuring so many subscribers, each agreeing to take so many 
copies. In consideration' of the dean’s known literary judg- 
ment and great influence, the publisher would, as a private 
favor, not object to take the risk of any further expenses.” 

So far every thing sounded charming. The method was 
not a very independent one, but it was the only one ; and 1 
should actually have the delight of having published a volume. 
But, alas ! “he thought that the sale of the book might he 
greatly facilitated, if certain passages of a strong political ten- 
dency were omitted. He did not wish personally to object to 
them as statements of facts, or to the pictorial vigor with 
which they were expressed'; hut he thought that they were 
somewhat too strong for the present state of the public taste ; 
and though he should be the last to allow any private consid- 
erations to influence his weak patronage of rising talent, yet, 
considering his present connection, he should hardly wish to 
take on himself the responsibility of publishing such passages, 
unless with great modifications.” 

“ You see,” said the good old man, “ the opinion of respect- 
able practical men, who know the world, exactly coincides 
with mine. I did not like to tell you that I could not help 
in the publication of your MSS. in their present state ; hut J 
am sure, from the modesty and gentleness which I have re- 
marked in you, your readiness to listen to reason, and your 
pleasing freedom from all violence or coarseness in expressing 


170 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


your opinions, that you will not object to so exceeihngly rea- 
sonable a request, which, after all, is only for your good. Ah ! 
young man,” he went on, in a more feeling tone than I had 
yet heard from him, “ if you were once embroiled in that po- 
litical world, of which you know so little, you would soon be 
crying like David, ‘ Oh, that I had wings like a dove, then 
would I flee away and be at rest !’ Do you fancy that you 
can alter a fallen world ? What it is, it always has been, 
and will be to the end. Every age has its political and* so- 
cial nostrums, my dear young man, and fancies them infalli- 
ble ; and the next generation arises to curse them as failures 
in practice, and superstitious in theory, and try some new nos- 
trum of its own.” 

I sighed. 

“ Ah ! you may sigh. But we have each of us to be dis 
enchanted of our dream. There was a time once when 1 
talked republicanism as loudly as raw youth ever did — when 
1 had an excuse for it, too ; for when I was a boy I saw the 
French Revolution ; and it was no wonder if young, enthusi- 
astic brains were excited by all sorts of wild hopes — ‘ perfect- 
ibility of the species,’ ‘ rights of ^nan,’ ‘ universal liberty, 
equality and brotherhood.’ My dear sir, there is nothing new 
under the sun ; all that is stale and trite to a septuagenarian, 
who has seen where it all ends. I speak to you freely, because 
I am deeply interested in you. I feel that this is the import- 
ant question of your life, and that you have talents the pos- 
session of which is a heavy responsibility. Eschew politics, 
once and for all, as I have done. I might have been, 1 may 
tell you, a bishop at this moment, if I had condescended to 
meddle again in those party questions of which my youthful 
experience sickened me. But I knew that I should only 
weaken my own influence, as that most noble and excellent 
man. Dr. Arnold, did, by interfering in politics. The poet, 
like the clergyman and the philosopher, has nothing to do 
with politics. Let them choose the better part, and it shall 
not be taken from them. The world may rave,” he contin- 
ued, waxing eloquent as he approached his favorite subject — 
“ the world may rave, but in the study there is quiet. The 
world may change, Mr. Locke, and will ; but ‘ the earth 
abideth forever.’ Solomon had seen somewhat of politics, and 
social improvement, and so on ; and behold, then, *as now 
‘ all was vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crook 
ed can not be made straight, and that which is wanting can 
not be numbered. What profit hath a man of all his labor 


V 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


17 


which he tiiketh under the sun? The thing which hath 
been, it is that which shall be, and there is no new thing 
under the sun. One generation passeth away, and another 
cometh ; but the earth abideth forever.’ No wonder that the 
wisest of men took refuge from such experience, as I have 
tried to do, in talking of all herbs, from the cedar of Lebanon 
to the hyssop that groweth on the wall I 

“ Ah ! Mr. Locke,” he went on, in a soft, melancholy, half- 
abstracted tone — “ ah ! Mr. Locke, I have felt deeply, and 
you will feel some day, the truth of Jarno’s saying in ‘Wil 
helm Meister,’ when he was wandering alone in the Alps, 
with his geological hammer, ‘ These rocks, at least, tell me no 
lies, as men do.’ Ay ; there is no lie in Nature, no discord 
in the revelations of science, in the laws of the universe. In- 
finite, pure, unfallen, earth-supporting Titans, fresh as on the 
morning of creation, those great laws endure ; your only true 
democrats, too — for nothing is too great or too small for them 
to take note of No tiniest gnat, or speck of dust, but they 
feed it, guide it, and preserve it. Hail and snow, wind and 
vapor, fulfilling their Maker’s word ; and like him, too, hiding 
themselves from the wise and prudent, and revealing them- 
selves unto babes. Yes, Mr. Loeike; it is the childlike, sim- 
ple, patient, reverent heart, which science at once demands 
and cultivates. To prejudice or haste, to self-conceit or am- 
bition, she proudly shuts her treasuries — to open them to men 
of humble heart, whom this world thinks simple dreamers — 
her Newtons, and Owens, and Faradays. Why should you 
not become such a man as they? You have the talents 
— you have the love for Nature — you seem to have the 
gentle and patient spirit, which, indeed, will grow up more 
and more in you, if you become a real student of science. Or, 
if you must be a poet, why not sing of Nature, and leave those 
to sing political squabbles, who have no eye for the beauty of 
her repose ? How few great poets have been politicians !” 

I gently suggested Milton. 

“ Ay ! he became a great poet only when he had deserted 
politics, because they had deserted him. In blindness and 
poverty, in the utter failure of all his national theories, he 
wrote the works which have made him immortal. Was 
Shakspeare a politician? or any one of the great poets who 
have arisen during the last thirty years ? Have they not all 
seemed to consider it a sacred duty to keep themselves, as far 
as they could, out of party-strife ?” 

I Quoted Southey, Shelley, and Burns, as instances to tlio 


172 A.LTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POUT. 

contrary ; "but his induction was completed already, to his own 
satisfaction. 

“ Poor dear Southey was a great verse-maker, rather than 
a great poet ; and I always consider that his party-prejudices 
and party-writing narrowed and harshened a mind which 
ought to have been flowing forth freely and lovingly toward 
all forms of life. And as for Shelley and Burns, their politics 
dictated to them at once the worst portions of their poetry 
and of their practice. Shelley, what little I have read of him, 
only seems himself when he forgets radicalism for nature ; and 
you would not set Burns’s life or death, either, as a model for 
imitation in any class. Now, do you know, I must ask you 
to leave me a little. I am somewhat fatigued with this long 
discussion” (in which, certainly, I had borne no great share) ; 
“ and I am sure that, after all I have said, you will see the 
propriety of acceding to the publisher’s advice. Go and think 
over it, and let me have your answer by post-time.” 

I did go and think over it — too long for my good. If ] 
had acted on the first impulse, I should have refused, and 
been safe. These passages were the very pith and marrow 
of the poems ; they were the very words which I had felt 
it my duty, my glory, to utter. I, who had been a work- 
ing-man, who had experienced all their sorrows and tempta- 
tions — I, seemed called by every circumstance of my life tc 
preach their cause, to expose their wrongs — I to quash my 
convictions, to stultify my book, for the sake of popularity, 
money, patronage ! And yet — all that involved seeing more 
of Lillian. They were only too powerful inducements in 
themselves, alas ! but I believe I could have resisted them 
tolerably, if they had not been backed by love. And so a 
struggle arose, which the rich reader may think a very fantas- 
tic one, though the poor man will understand it, and surely 
pardon it also — seeing that he himself is Man. Could I not, 
just once in a way, serve God and Mammon at once ? — or 
rather, not Mammon, but Venus : a worship which looked to 
me, and really was in my case, purer than all the Mariolatry 
in Popedom. After all, the fall might not be so great as it 
seemed perhaps I was not infallible on these same points. 
(It is wonderful how humble and self-denying one becomes 
when one is afraid of doing one’s duty.) Perhaps the dean 
might be right. He had been republican himself Diice, cer- 
tainly. The facts, indeed, which I had stated, there could bo 
no doubt of ; but I might have viewed them through a pre 
judiced and angry medium— I might have been not quite 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POEl. 


173 


logical in ray deductions from them — I might — . In short 
between “ perhapses” and “mights,” I fell — a very deep, real, 
damnable fall ; and consented to emasculate my poems, and 
become a flunky and a dastard. 

I mentioned my consent that evening to the party ; the 
dean purred content thereat. Eleanor, to my astonishment, 
just said, sternly and abruptly, 

“ Weak !” and then turned away, while Lillian began : 

“Oh! what a pity! And really they were some of the 
prettiest verses of all ! But of course my father must know 
best ; you are quite right to be guided by him, and do what- 
ever is proper and prudent. After all, papa, I have got the 
naughtiest of them all, you know, safe. Eleanor set it to 
music, and wrote it out in her book ; and I thought it so 
charming that I copied it.” 

What Lillian said about herself, I drank in as greedily as 
usual ; what she said about Eleanor, fell on a heedless ear, and 
vanished, not to re-appear in my recollection till — . But T 
must not anticipate. 

So it was all settled pleasantly; and I sat up that even- 
ing, writing a bit of verse for Lillian, about the Old Cathe- 
dral, and “Heaven-aspiring towers,” and “Aisles of cloistered 
shade,” and all that sort of thing ; which I did not believe, 
or care for ; but I thought it would please her, and so it did ; 
and I got golden smiles and compliments for ray first, though 
not my last, insincere poem. I was going fast dowi hill in 
my hurry to rise. However, as I said, it was all pleasant 
enough. I was to return to town, and there wait the dean’s 
orders ; and, most luckily, I had received that morning from 
Sandy Mackaye a characteristic letter : 

“Gowk, Telemachus, hearken ! Item 1. Ye’r fou wi’ the 
Circean cup, aneath the shade o’ shovel hats and steeple- 
houses. 

“Item 2. I, cuif-Mentor that I am, wearing out a gude 
pair o’ gude Scots brogues, that my sister’s husband’s third 
cousin sent me a towmond gane fra Aberdeen, rinning ower 
the town to a’ journals, respectable and ither, anent the sel- 
lin’ o’ your ‘ Autobiography of an Engine-Boiler in the Vaux- 
hall-road,’ the whilk I ha’ disposit o’ at the last, to O’Flynn’s 
Weekly Warwhoop ; and gin ye ha’ only mair sic trash in 
your head, ye may get your meal whiles out o’ the same kist ; 
unless, as I sair misdoubt, ye’re praying already, like Eli’s 
bairns, ‘ to be put into ane o’ the priest’s offices, that ye may 
eat a piece o’ bread.’ 


174 


\LTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Ye’ll be coming the morrow ? I’m lane without ye ; 
though I look for ye surely to come ben wi’ a gowd shoulder- 
knot, and a red nose.” 

This letter, though it hit me hard, and made me, I confess, 
a little angry at the moment with my truest friend, still offer- 
ed me a means of subsistence, and enabled me to decline safe- 
ly the pecuniary aid which I dreaded the dean’s offering me. 
And yet I felt dispirited and ill at ease. My conscience would 
not let me enjoy the success I felt I had attained. But next 
morning I saw Lillian ; and I forgot books, people’s cause, 
conscience, and every thing. 

r went home by coach — a luxury on which my cousin in- 
sisted — as he did on lending me the fare ; so that in all I 
owed him somewhat more than eleven pounds. But I was 
too happy to care for a fresh debt, and home I went, consid- 
ering my fortune made. 

My heart fell, as I stepped into the dingy little old shop. 
Was it the meanness of the place, after the comfort and ele- 
gance of my late abode ? Was it disappointment at not find- 
ing Mackaye at home “? Or was it that black-edged letter 
which lay waiting for me on the table ? I was afraid to open 
it : I knew not why. I turned it over and over several times, 
trying to guess v/hose the handwriting on the cover might be 
the post-mark was two days old ; and at last I broke the seal ‘ 

“ Sir — This is to inform you, that your mother, Mrs. Locke, 
died this morning, a sensible sinner, not without assurance of 
her election ; and that her funeral is fixed for Wednesday, 
the 29th instant. 

The humble servant of the Lord’s people, 

“ J. M^igginton.” 


CHAPTER XIX. 

SHORT AND SAD. 

I SHALL pass over the agonies of the next few days. There 
is self-exenteration enough and to spare in my story, without 
dilating on them. They are loo saered to publish, and too 
painful, alas ! even to recall. I write my story, too, as a 
working-man. Of those emotions which are common to hu- 
manity, I shall say but little — except Mdien it is necessary to 
])iove that the working-man has feelings like the rest of his 
kind. But those feelings may, in this case, be supplied by the 
reader’s own imagination. Let him represent them to himself 
as bitter, as remorseful as he will, he will not equal the real- 
ity. True, she had cast me off; but had I not rejoiced in that 
rejection which should have been my shame ? True, I had 
fed on the hope of some day winning reconciliation, by win- 
ning fame ; but before the fame had arrived, the reconciliation 
had become impossible. I had shrunk from going back to her, 
as I ought to have done, in filial humility, and, therefore, I was 
not allowed to go back to her in the pride of success. Heaven 
knows, I had not forgotten her. Night and day I had thought 
of her with prayers and blessings; but I had made a merit 
of my own love to her — my forgiveness of her, as I dared to 
call it. J. had pampered my conceit with the notion that I 
was a martyr in the cause of genias and enlightenment. How 
hollow, windy, heartless, all that looked now. There ! I will 
say no more. Heaven preserve any who read these pages, » 
from such days and nights as I dragged on till that funeral, 
and for weeks after it was over, when I had sat once more in 
the little old chapel, with all the memories of my childhood 
crowding up, and tantalizing me with the vision of their sim- 
ple peace — never, never to return ! I heard my mother’s 
dying pangs, her prayers, her doubts her agonies, for my rep- 
robate soul, dissected for the public good by my old enemy, 
Mr. Wigginton, who dragged in, among his fulsome eulogies 
of my mother’s “ signs of grace,” rejoicings that there were 
‘ babes span-long in hell.” I saw my sister Susan, now a 
tall handsome woman, but become all rigid, sour, with coarse 
grim lips, and that crushed, self-conscious, reserved, almost 
dishonest look about the eyes, common to fanatics of every 
creed. I heard her cold farewell, as she put into my hands 
certain notes and dianes of my mother’s which she had be- 


176 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


queathed to me on her death-bed. I heard myself proclaimed 
inheritor of some small matters of furniture, which had belong- 
ed to her ; told Susan, carelessly to keep them for herself; and 
went forth fancying that the curse of Cain was on my brow. 

I took home the diary ; but several days elapsed before I had 
courage to open it. Let the words I read there be as secret 
as the misery which dictated them. I had broken my mother’s 
heart I — no ! I had not ! — The infernal superstition which 
taught her to fancy that Heaven’s love was narrower than her 
own — that God could hate his creature, not lor its sins, but for 
its very nature which he had given it — that, that had killed her ! 

And I remarked, too, with a gleam of hope, that in several 
places where sunshine seemed ready to break through the 
black cloud of fanatic gloom ; where she seemed inclined not 
merely to melt toward me (for there was, in every page, an 
under-current of love, deeper than death, and stronger than 
the grave), but also to dare to trust God on my behalf — be- 
hold lines carefully erased, page after page torn out, evidently 
long after the MSS. were written. I believe, to this day, 
that either my poor sister or her father-confessor was the per- 
petrator of that act. ^\\q fraus 2)i(i is not yet extinct; and 
it is as inconvenient now as it was in popish times, to tell the 
whole truth about saints, when they dare to say or do things 
which will not quite fit into the formula 3 of their sect. 

But what was to become of Susan 1 Though my uncle 
continued to her the allowance wLich he had made to my 
mother, yet I was her natural protector — and she was my 
only tie on earth. Was I to lose her, too 1 Might we not, 

I after all, be happy together, in some little hole in Chelsea, 
like Elia and his Bridget ? That question was solved for me. 
She declined my ofiers ; saying, that she could not live with 
any one whose religious opinions differed from her own, and 
that she had already engaged a room at the house of a Chris- 
tian friend ; and was shortly to be united to that dear man 
of God, Mr. Wigginton, who was to be removed to the work 
of the Lord in Manchester. 

I knew the scoundrel, but it would have been impossible 
for me to undeceive her. Perhaps he was only a scoundrel — 
perhaps he would not ill-treat her. And yet— my oAvn little 
Susan ! my playfellow ! my only tie on earth — to lose her — 
and not only her, but her respect, her love ! And my spirit, 
deep enough already, sank deeper still into sadness ; and I 
felt myself alone on earth, and clung to Mackaye as to a 
father— and a father indeed that old man Avas to me ! 


CHAPTER XX. 
PEGASUS IN HARNESS. 


Bdt, in sorrow or in joy, I had to earn my bread ; and so, 
too, had Crossthwaite, poor fellow ! How he contrived to 
- feed himself and his little Katie for the next few years, is 
more than I can tell ; at all events, he worked hard enough 
He scribbled, agitated ; ran from London to Manchester, and 
Manchester to Bradford, spouting, lecturing — sowing the east 
wind, I am afraid, and little more. Whose fault was it I 
What could such a man do, with that fervid tongue, and 
heart, and brain of his, in such a station as his, such a time 
as this ? Society had helped to make him an agitator. So- 
ciety has had, more or less, to take consequences of her own. 
handiwork. For Crossthwaite did not speak without hearers. 
He could make the fierce, shrewd artisan nature flash out 
into fire — not always celestial, nor always, either, infernal. 
So he agitated, and lived — how, I know not. That he did do 
so, is evident from the fact that he and Katie are at this mo- 
ment playing chess in the cabin, before my eyes, and making 
love, all the while, as if they had not been married a week — 
Ah, well ! 

I, however, had to do more than get my bread ; I had to 
pay off those fearful eleven pounds odd, which, now that all 
the excitement of my stay at D had been so sadly quench- 

ed, lay like lead upon my memory. My list of subscribers 
filled slowly, and I had no power of increasing it, by any can- 
vassings of my own. My uncle, indeed, had promised to take 
two copies, and my cousin one ; not wishing, of course, to be 
so uncommercial as to run any risk, before they had seen 
whether my poems would succeed. But, with those excep- 
tions, the dean had it all his own way ; and he could not be 
expected to forego his own literary labors for my sake ; so, 
through all that glaring summer, and sad foggy autumn, and 
nipping winter, I had to get my bread as I best could — by my 
pen Mackaye grumbled at my writing so much, and so fast, 
and sneered about the furor scribendi. But it was hardly 
fair upon me. “ My mouth craved it of me,” as Solomon 
says. I had really no other means of livelihood. Even if I 
could have got employment as a tailor, in the honorable trade, 
T l^^athed the business utterly— perhaps, alas! to confess the 




178 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

truth, I was beginning to despise it. I could bear to think 
of myself as a poor genius, in connection with my new wealthy 
and high-bred patrons ; for there was precedent for the thing. 
Penniless bards and squires of low degree, low-born artists, 
ennobled by their pictures — there was something grand in the 
notion of mind triumphant over the inequalities of rank, and 
associating with the great and wealthy, as their spiritual equal, 
on the mere footing of its own innate nobility ; no matter to 
what den it might return, to convert it into a temple of the 
Muses, by the glorious creations of its fancy, &c., &c. But 
to go back daily from the drawing-room and the publisher’s 
to the goose and the shop-board, was too much for my weak- 
ness, even if it had been physically possible, as, thank Heaven, 
it was not. 

So I became a hack writer, and sorrowfully, but deliber- 
ately, “ put my Pegasus into heavy harness,” as my betters 
had done before me. It was miserable work, there is no 
denying it — only not worse than tailoring. To try and serve 
God and Mammon too ; to make miserable compromises 
daily, between the tw'o great incompatibilities — what was true, 
and what would pay ; to speak my mind, in fear and trem- 
bling, by hints, and halves, and quarters ; to be daily hauling 
poor Truth just up to the top of her well, and then, frightened 
at my own success, let her plump down again to the bottom ; 
to sit there, trying to teach others, while my mind was in a 
whirl of doubt ; to feed others’ intellects, while my own were 
hungering ; to grind on in the Philistines’ mill, or occasion- 
ally make sport for them, like some weary-hearted clown 
grinning in a pantomime, in a “ light article,” as blind as 
Samson, but not, alas ! as strong, lor indeed my Delilah of 
the West-end had clipped my locks, and there seemed little 
chance of their growing again. That face and that drawing- 
room flitted before me from morning till eve, and enervated 
and distracted my already over- wearied brain. 

I had no time, besides, to concentrate my thoughts suffi- 
ciently for poetry ; no time to wait for inspiration. From the 
moment 1 had swallowed my breakfast, I had to sit scribbling 
off my thoughts anyhow in prose ; and soon my own scanty 
stock was exhausted, and 1 was forced to beg, borrow, and 
steal notions and facts, wherever I could get them. Oh ! the 
misery of having to read, not what I longed to know, but 
what I thought would pay! — to skip page after page of in- 
teresting matter, just to pick out a single thought or sentence 
which could be stitched into my patchwork ! — and then the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


179 


still greater misery of seeing the article which I had sent to 
press a tolerably healthy and lusty bantling, appear in print 
next week, after suffering the inquisitiomtortures of the edi- 
torial censorship, all maimed, and squinting, and one-sided, 
with the color rubbed off its poor cheeks, and generally a vil- 
lainous hang-dog look of ferocity, so different from its birth- 
smile that I often did not know my own child again ! — and 
then, when I dared to remonstrate, however feebly, to be told, 
by way of comfort, that the public taste must be consulted ! 
It gave me a hopeful notion of the said taste, certainly ; and 
often and often I groaned in spirit over the temper of my own 
class, which not only submitted to, but demanded, such one- 
sided bigotry, prurience, and ferocity, from those who set up 
as its guides and teachers, 

Mr. O’ Flynn, editor of the Weekly Warhooy^ whose white 
slave I now found myself, was, I am afraid, a pretty faithful 
specimen of that class, as it existed before the bitter lesson of 
the 10th of April brought the Chartist working men and the 
Chartist press to their senses. Thereon sprang up a new 
race of papers, whose moral tone, whatever may be thought 
of their political or doctrinal opinions, was certainly not in- 
ferior to that of the Whig and Tory press. The Common- 
ivealth, the Standard of Freedom, the Flam Speaker, were 
reprobates, if to be a Chartist is to be a reprobate : but none 
except the most one-sided bigots could deny them the praise 
of a stern morality and a lofty earnestness, a hatred of evil 
and craving after good, which would often put to shame many 
a paper among the oracles of Belgravia and Exeter Hall. 
But those were the days of lubricity and O’ Flynn. Not that 
the man was an unredeemed scoundrel. He w^as no more 
profligate, either in his literary or his private morals, than 
many a man who earns his hundreds, sometimes his thousands, 
a year, by prophesying smooth things to Mammon, crying in 
daily leaders, “ Peace ! peace !” when there is no peace, and 
daubing the rotten walls of careless luxury and self-satisfied 
covetousness with the untempered mortar of party statistics 
and garbled foreign news — till “ the storm shall fall, and the 
breaking thereof cometh suddenly in an instant.” Let those 
of the respectable press who are without sin, cast the first 
stone at the unrespectable. Many of the latter class, who 
have been branded as traitors and villains, were single-minded, 
earnest, valiant men ; and, as for even O’Flynn, and those 
worse than him, what was really the matter with them was, 
that they were too honest — they spoke out too much of their 


180 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


whole minds. Bewildered, like Lear, amid the social storm, 
they had determined, like him, to become “ unsophisticated,’’ 
to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume” — seeing, in 
deed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them ; so 
they tore off, of their own will, the peacock’s feathers of gen 
tility, the sheep’s clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves 
of decent reticence, and became just what they really were — 
just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the 
high places of the earth, if it paid them as w'ell to be unre- 
spectable as it does to be respectable ; if the selfishness and 
covetousness, bigotry and ferocity, which are in them, and 
more or less in every man, had happened to enlist them 
against existing evils, in^ead of for them. O’ Flynn would 
have been gladly as respectable as they ; but, in the first 
place, he must have starved ; and in the second place, ho 
must have lied ; for he believed in his own radicalism with 
his whole soul. There was a ribald sincerity, a frantic cour- 
age in the man. He always spoke the truth when it suited 
him, and very often when it did not. He did see, which is 
more than all do, that oppression is oppression, and humbug, 
humbug. He had faced the gallows before now, without 
flinching. He had spouted rebellion in the Birmingham 
Bullring, and elsewhere, and taken the consequences like a 
man ; while his colleagues left their dupes to the tender mer- 
cies of broadswords and bayonets, and decamped in the dis- 
guise of sailors, old women, and dissenting preachers. He had 
sat three months in Lancaster Castle, the Bastile of England, 
one day perhaps to fall like that Parisian one, for a libel 
which he never wrote, because he would not betray his cow- 
ardlv contributor. He had twice pleaded his own cause, 
without help of attorney, and showed himself as practiced in 
every law-quibble and practical cheat as if he had been a 
regularly-ordained priest of the blue-bag ; and each time, 
when hunted at last into a corner, had turned valiantly to 
bay, with wild witty Irish eloquence, “ worthy,” as the press 
say of poor misguided Mitchell, “ of a better cause.” Al- 
together, a much-enduring Ulysses, unscrupulous, tough-hided, 
ready to do and suffer any thing fair or foul, for what he 
honestly believed — if a confused, virulent positiveness be 
worthy of the name “ belief” — to be the true and righteous 
cause. 

Those who class all mankind compendiously and comforta- 
bly under the two exhaustive species of saints and villains, 
may consider such a description garbled and impossible I 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


181 


ha\e seen few men, but never yet met I among those few 
either perfect saint or perfect villain. I draw men as I have 
found them — inconsistent, piecemeal, better than their own 
actions, worse than their own opinions, and poor O’Flynn 
among the rest. Not that there were no questionable spots 
in the sun of his fair fame. It was whispered that he had in 
.^Id times done dirty work for Dublin Castle bureaucrats — 
nay, that ho had even, in a very hard season, written court 
poetry for the Morning Post ; but all these little peccadilloes 
lie carefully vailed in that kindly mist which hung over his 
youthful years, He had been a medical student, and got 
plucked, his foes declared, in his examination. He had set 
up a saving’s bank, which broke. He had come over from 
Ireland, to agitate for “repale” and “rint,” and, like a wise 
man as he was, had never gone back again. He had set up 
three or four papers in his time, and entered into partnership 
with every leading democrat in turn ; but his papers failed, 
and be quarreled with his partners, being addicted to profane 
swearing and personalities. And now at last, after Ulyssean 
wanderings, he had found rest in the. office of the Weekly 
Wartvhoo]?, if rest it could be called, that perennial hurricane 
of plotting, railing, sneering, and bombast, in which he lived, 
never writing a line, on principle, till he had worked himself 
up into a passion. 

I will dwell no more on so distasteful a subject. Such 
leaders, let us hope, belong only to the past — to the youthful 
self-will and licentiousness of democracy ; and as for reviling 
O’Flynn, or any other of his class, no man has less right than 
myself, I fear, to cast stones at such as they, I fell as low 
as almost any, beneath the besetting sins of my class ; and 
shall I take merit to myself, because God has shown me, a 
little earlier, perhaps, than to them, somewhat more of the true 
duties and destinies of The Many 1 Oh, that they could see 
the depths of my affection for them ! Oh, that they could 
see the .shame and self-abasement with which, in rebuking 
their sins, I cohfess my own ! If they are apt to be flippant 
and bitter, so was I. If they lust to destroy, without know- 
ing what to build up instead, so did I. If they make an 
almighty idol of that Electoral Reform, which ought to be 
and can be, only a preliminary means, and expect final deliv- 
erance, from “ their twenty-thousandth part of a talker in the 
national palaver,” so did 1. Unhealthy and noisome as was 
the literary atmosphere in which I now found myself, it was 
one to my taste. The very contrast between the peaceful, 


182 - 


ALTON LOCKF TAILOR AND POET. 

intellectual luxary which I had just witnessed, and the mis 
ery of my class and myself, quicked my delight in it. In bit- 
terness, in sheer envy, I threw my whole soul into it, and 
spoke evil, and rejoiced in- evil. It was so easy to find fault ! 
It pampered my own self-conceit, my own discontent, while 
it saved me the trouble of inventing remedies. Yes ; it was 
indeed easy to find fault, “The world was ali before me, 
where to choose.” In such a disorganized, anomalous, 
grumbling, party-embittered element as this English society, 
and its twin pauperism and luxury, I had but to look 
straight before me to see my prey. 

And thus 1 became daily more and more cynical, fierce, 
reckless. My mouth was filled with cursing — and too often 
justly. And all the while, like tens of thousands of my class, 
I had no man to teach me. Sheep scattered on the hills, we 
were, that had no shepherd. What wonder if our bones lay 
bleaching among rocks and quagmires, and wolves devoured 
the heritage of God ? 

Mackaye had nothing positive, after all, to advise or pro- 
pound. His wisdom .was one of apopthegms and maxims, 
utterly impiractical, too often merely negative, as was his 
creed, which, though he refused to be classed with any sect, 
was really a somewhat undefined Unitarianism — or rather 
[slamism. He could say, with the old Moslem, “ God is 
great — who hath resisted his will ?” And he believed what 
he said, and lived manful and pure, reverent and self-denying, 
by that belief, as the first- Moslem did. But that was not 
enough. 

“ Not enough ? Merely negative ?” 

No — that was positive enough, and mighty ; but I repeal 
it, it was not enough. He felt it so himself; for he grew 
rnore and more cynical, more and more hopeless about the 
prospects of his class and of all humanity. Why not ? Poor 
sufiering wretches ! what is it to them to know that “ God is 
great,” unless you can prove to them that God is also merci- 
ful ] Did he indeed care for men at all ? was what I longed 
to know ; was all this misery and misrule around us his will 
— his stern and necessary law — his lazy connivance ? And 
were we to free ourselves from it by any frantic means that 
came to hand? or had he ever interfered himself? Was 
there a chance, a hope, of his interfering now, in our own 
time, to take the matter into his own hand, and come out of 
his place to judge the earth in righteousness ? That was 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 183 

what we wanted to know ; and poor Mackaye could give no 
comfort there. “ God was great — the wicked would be 
turned into hell.” Ay — the few willful, triumphant wicked; 
but the millions of suffering, starving wicked, the victims of 
society and circumstance — what hope for them ? “ God was 

great.” And for the clergy, our professed and salaried teach- 
ers, all I can say is — and there are tens, perhaps hundreds of 
thousands of workmen who can re-echo my words — with the 
-exception of the dean and my cousin, and one who shall be 
mentioned hereafter, a clergymen never spoke to me in my 
life. 

Why should he? Was I not a Chartist and an Infi- 
del ? The truth is, the clergy are afraid of us To read the 
Dispatch, is to be excommunicated. Young men’s classes ? 
Honor to them, however few they are — however hampered 
by the restrictions of religious bigotry and political cowardice. 
But the working-men, whether rightly or wrongly, do not 
trust them ; they do not trust the clergy who set them on 
foot ; they do not expect to be taught at them the things 
they long to know — to be taught the whole truth in them 
about history, politics, science, the Bible. They suspect them 
to be mere tubs to the whale — mere substitutes for education, 
slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the 
importunate. They may misjudge the clergy ; but whose 
fault is it if th(^ do ? Clergymen of England ! — look at the 
history of your Establishment for the last fifty years, and say, 
what wonder is it if the artisan mistrust you ? Every spirit- 
ual reform, since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish 
itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every 
ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without 
your body. Mr. Horsman, struggling against every kind of 
temporizing and trickery, has to do the w'ork which bishops, 
by virtue of their seat in the House of Lords, ought to have 
been doing years ago. Every where we see the clergy, with 
a few persecuted exceptions (like Dr. Arnold), proclaiming 
themselves the advocates of Toryism, the dogged opponents of 
our political liberty, living either by the accursed system of 
pew-rents, or else by one which depends on the high price of 
corn ; chosen exclusively from the classes who crush us down ; 
prohibiting all free discussion on religious points ; command- 
ing us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as 
that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad 
example, and their scanda.ous neglect, have, in the last three 
generations, alienated us ; never mixing with the thought- 


184 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 

ful working-men, except in the prison, the hospital, or in 
extreme old age ; betraying, in every tract, in every sermon, 
an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of 
the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed 
before God and man. And then will you show us a few 
tardy improvements here and there, and ask us, indignantly, 
why we distrust you ? Oh ! gentlemen, if you can not see for 
yourselves the causes of our distrust, it is past our power to 
show you. We must leave it to God. 

But to return to my own stoiy. I had, as I said before, to 
live by my pen ; and in that painful, confused, maimed way, 
I contrived to scramble on the long winter through, writing 
regularly for the Weekly Warwhoojp, and sometimes getting 
an occasional scrap into some other cheap periodical, often on 
the very verge of starvation, and glad of a handful of meal 
from Sandy’s widow’s barrel. If I had had more than my 
share of feasting in the summer, I made the balance even, 
during those frosty months, by many a bitter fast. 

And, here let me ask you, gentle reader, who are just now 
considering me ungentle, virulent, and noisy, did you ever, for 
one day in your Avhole life, literally, involuntarily, and in 
spite of all your endeavors, longings, and hungerings, not get 
enough to cat 1 If you ever have, it must have taught you 
several things. 

But all this while, it must not be supposed that I had for- 
gotten my promise to good Farmer Porter, to look for his 
missing son. And, indeed, Crossthwaite and I were already 
engaged in a similar search for a friend of his — the young 
tailor, who, as I told Porter, had been lost for several months 
He was the brother of Crossthwaite’s wife, a passionate, kind 
hearted Irishman, Mike Kelly by name, reckless and scatter- 
brained enough to get himself into every possible scrape, and 
weak enough of will never to get himself out of one. For 
these two, Crossthwaite and I had searched from one sweater’s 
den to another, and searched in vain. And though the pres- 
ent interest and exertion kept us both from brooding over our 
own difficulties, yet in the long run, it tended only to embitter 
and infuriate our minds. The frightful scenes of hopeless 
misery which we witnessed — ihe ever widening pit of pauper- 
ism and slavery, gaping for fresh victims day % day, as they 
dropped out of the fast lessening “ honorable trade,” into the 
ever-increasing miseries of sweating, piece-work, and starva- 
tion-prices ; the horrible certainty that the rame process 


# 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 185 

which was devouring our trade, was slowly, but surely, eat- 
ing up every other also ; the knowledge that there was no 
remedy, no salvation for us in iiian, that political economists 
had declared such to be the law and constitution of society, 
and that our rulers had believed that message, and were 
determined to act upon it ; — if all these things did not go far 
tow'ard maddening us, we must have been made of sterner 
stuff than any one who reads this book. , 

At last, about the middle of January, just as we had given 
up the search as hopeless, and poor Katie’s eyes were ’getting 
• red and swelled with daily weeping, a fresh spur was given to 
our exertions, by the sudden appearance of no less a person 
than the farmer himself. What ensued upon his coming, 
must be kept for another chapter. 




CHAPTEPv XXI. 


THE SWEATER’S DEN. 

I WAS greedily devouring Lane’s “ Arabian Nights,” which 
had made their lirst appearance in the shop that day. 

Mackaye sat in his usual place, smoking a clean pipe, and 
assisting his meditations by certain mysterious chironomic 
signs ; while opposite to him was Farmer Porter — a stone or 
two thinner -than when I had seen him last, but one stone 
is not much missed out of seventeen. His forehead looked 
smaller, and his jaws larger than ever ; and his red face was 
sad, and furrowed with care. 

Evidently, too, he was ill at ease about other matters be 
sides his son. He was looking out of the corners of his eyes, 
first at the skinless cast on the chimney-piece, then at the 
crucified books hanging over his head, as if he considered them 
not altogether safe companions, and rather expected some- 
thing “ uncanny” to lay hold of him from behind — a process 
which involved the most horrible contortions of visage, as he 
carefully abstained from stirring a muscle of his neck or body, 
but sat bolt upright, his elbows pinned to his sides, and his 
knees as close together as his stomach would permit, like a 
huge corpulent Egyptian Mernnon — the most ludicrous con- 
trast to the little old man opposite, twisted up together in his 
•Joseph’s coat, like some wizard magician in the stories which 
I was reading. A curious pair of “ poles” the two made ; 
the mesothet whereof, by no means a '' 'punctuyn indiffereyis” 
but a true connecting spiritual idea, stood on the table — in 
the whisky-bottle. 

Farmer Porter was evidently big with some great thought, 
and had all a true poet’s bashfulness about publishing the 
fruit of his creative genius. He looked round again at the 
skinless man, the caricatures, the books ; and as his eye wan- 
dered from pile to pile, and shelf to shelf, his face brightened, 
and he seemed to gain courage. 

Solemnly he put his hat on his knees, and began solemnly 
brushing it with his cuff. Then he saw me watching him, and 
stopped. Then he put his pipe solemnly on the hob, and clear- 
ed his throat fcr action, while I buried my face in the book. 

“ Them’s a sight o’ lamed beuks, Mr. Mackaye ?” 

“ Humph !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


187 


Yow maun ha’ got a deal o’ scholarship among they, 
noo 

“ Humph !” 

“ Pee yow think, noo, yow could find-pf my boy out of uri, 
be any ways o’ conjuring like V’ 

“By what?” 

“ Conjuring — to strick a perpendicular, noo, or say the 
Lord’s Prayer backwards?” 

“ Wadna ye prefer a meeracle or twa ?” asked Sandy, after 
a long pull at the whisky-toddy. 

“ Or a few efreets ?” added 1. 

“ Whatsoever you likes, gentlemen. You’re best judges, 
to be sure,” answered Farmer Porter, in an awed and help- 
less voice. 

“ Aweel — I’m no that disinclined to believe in the occult 
sciences. I dinna baud a’thegither wi’ Salverte. There 
was mair in them than Magia naturalis, I’m thinking. Mes- 
merism and magic-lanterns, benj and opium, winna explain 
all facts, Alton, laddie. Bootless they were an unco’ barbaric 
an’ empiric method o’ expressing the gran’ truth o’ man’s 
mastery ower matter. But the interpenetration o’ the spirit- 
ual an’ physical worlds is a gran’ truth too; an’ aiblins the 
Deity might ha’ allowed witchcraft, just to teach that to puir 
barbarous folk — signs and wonders, laddie, to make them be- 
lieve in somewhat mair than the beasts that perish : an’ so 
ghaists an’ warlocks might be a necessary element o’ the 
divine education in dark and carnal times. But I’ve no read 
o’ a case in which necromancy, nor geomancy, nor coskino- 
mancy, nor ony ither mancy, was applied to sic a purpose as 
this. Unco gude they were, may be, for the discovery o’ 
stolen spunes — but no that o’ stolen tailors.” 

Farmer Porter had listened to this harangue, with mouth 
and eyes gradually expanding between awe and the desire 
to comprehend ; but at the last sentence his countenance fell. 

“So I’m thinking Mister Porter, that the best witch in 
siccan a case is ane that ye may find at the police-office.” 

“ Anan ?” 

“ Thae detective police are gran’ necromancers an’ canny 
in their way : an’ I just took the liberty, a week agone, to ha’ 
a crack wi’ ane o’ ’em. And noo, gin ye’re inclined, we’ll 
leave the whusky awhile, an’ gang up to that cave o’ Troph- 
awnius, ca’d by the vulgar Bow-street, an’ speir for tidings 
o' the twa lost sheep.” 

So to Bow-street we went and found our man, to whom 


188 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


the farmer bowed with obsequiousness most unlike his usual 
burly independence. He evidently half suspected him to 
have dealings with the world of spirits : but Avhether he had 
such or not, they had been utterly unsuccessful ; and we 
walked back again, with the farmer between us half blub- 
bering : 

“1 tell ye, there’s nothing like ganging to a wise ’ooman. 
Bless ye, I mind one up to Guy Hall, when I was a barn, 
that two Irish reapers coom down, and murthured her for the 
money — and if you lost aught she’d vind it, so sure as the 
church — and a mighty hand to cure burns ; and they two 
villians coom back, after harvest, seventy mile to do it — and 
when my vather’s cows was shrew-struck, she made un be 
draed under a brimble as growled together at the both ends, 
she a-praying like mad all the time ; and they never got 
nothing but fourteen shilling and a crooked sixpence ; foi 
why, the devil carried off all the rest of her money : and 1 
seen ’um both a-hanging in chains by Wisbeach river, with 
my own eyes. So when thae Irish reapers comes into the 
vens, our chaps always says, ‘ Yow goo to Guy Hall, there’s 
yor brithren a- waitin’ for yow,’ and that do make ’um joost 
mad loike, it do. I tell ye there’s nowt like a wise ’ooman, 
for vinding out the likes o’ this.” 

At this hopeful stage of the argument I left them, to go to 
the Magazine-office. As I passed through Co vent Garden, a 
pretty young woman stopped me under a gas-lamp. I was 
pushing on, when I saw that it was Jemmy .Downes’s Irish 
wife, and saw, too, that she did not recognize me. A sudden 
instinct made me stop and hear what she had to say. 

“ Shure then, and yer a tailor, rny young man?” 

“ Yes,” I said, nettled a little that my late loathed profes- 
sion still betrayed itself in my gait. 

“From the counthry ?” 

I nodded, though I dare not speak a white lie to that effect. 
I fancied that, somehow, through her I might hear of poor 
Kelly and his friend Porter. 

“ Ye’ll be wanting work thin ?” 

“ I have no work.” 

“ Och then, it’s I can show ye the flower o’ work, I can 
Bedad, there’s a shop I know of where ye’ll earn — bedad, if 
ye’re the ninth part of a man, let alone a handy young fellow 
like the looks of you — och, ye’ll earn thirty shillings the week, 
to the very least — an’ beautiful lodgings; och, thin, just come 
and see ’em — as chape as mother’s milk ! Come along 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


18D 


thin — och, it’s the beauty ye are — -just the nate figure for a 
tailor.” 

The fancy still possessed me ; and I went with her through 
one dingy back street after another. She seemed to be pur- 
posely taking an indirect road, to mislead me as to my where- 
abouts ; but after a half-hour’s walking, I knew, as well as 
she, that we were in one of the most miserable slop-working 
nests of the East-end. 

She stopped at a house door, and hurried me in, up to the 
first floor, and into a dirty, slatternly parlor, smelling infa- 
mously of gin ; where the first object I beheld was Jemmy 
Downes, sitting before the fire, three parts drunk, with a 
couple of dirty, squalling children on the hearth rug, whom 
he was kicking and cuffing alternately. 

“ Och, thin, ye villain, bating the poor darlints whinever I 
lave ye a minute and pouring out a volley of Irish curses, 
she caught up the urchins, one under each arm, and kissed 
and hugged them till they were nearly choked. 

“ Och, ye plague o’ my life — as drunk as a baste ; an’ I 
brought home this darlint of a young gentleman to help ye in 
the business.” 

Downes got up, and steadying himself by the table, leered 
at me with lack-lustre eyes, and attempted a little ceremoni- 
ous politeness. How this was to end I did not see ; but I 
was determined to carry it through, on the chance of success, 
infinitely small as that might be. ' 

“ An’ I’ve told him thirty shillings a week’s the least he’ll 
earn; and charges for board and lodging only seven shillings.” 

“Thirty! — she lies; she’s always a-lying ; don’t you 
mind her. Five-and-forty is the worry lowest figure. Ask 
my respectable and most piousest partner, Shemei Solomons. 
Why, blow me — it’s Jjocke !” 

“ Yes, it is Locke ; and surely you’re my old friend, Jemmy 
Downes ? Shake hands. What an unexpected pleasure to 
meet you again !” 

“ Worry unexpected pleasure. Tip us your daddle ! De- 
lighted — delighted, as I was a-saying, to be of the least use to 
yer. Take a caulker ? Summat heavy, then? No? ‘Tak’ 
a drap o’ kindness yet, for auld langsyne ?’ ” 

“ Y'ou forget I was always a teetotaler.” 

“Ay,” with a look of unfeigned pity. “An’ you’re a-going 
to lend us a hand ? Oh, ah ! perhaps you’d like to begin ? 
Here s a most beautiful uniform, now, for a markis in her 
Majesty’s Guards; we don’t mention names — tarn’t business 


i90 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


iike. P’r’aps you’d like best to work here to-night, lor com- 
pany — ‘ for auld langsyne, my boys and I’ll introduce yer to 
to the gents up-stairs to-morrow.” 

“No,” I said ; “I’ll go up at once, if you’ve no objection.’ 

“ Och, thin, but the sheets isn’t aired — no — faix ; and I’m 
thinking the gentleman as is a-going isn’t gone yet.” 

But I insisted on going up at once ; and, grumbling, she 
followed me. I stopped on the landing of the second floor, 
and asked which way ; and seeing her in no hurry to answer, 
opened a door, inside which I heard the hum of many voices, 
saying in as sprightly a tone as I could muster, that I sup- 
posed that was the workroom. 

As I had expected, a fetid, choking den, with just room 
enough in it for the seven or eight sallow, starved beings, 
who, coatless, shoeless, and ragged, sat stitching, each on his 
truckle-bed. I glanced round ; the man whom I sought was 
not there. 

My heart fell ; why it had ever risen to such a pitch of 
hope I can not tell ; and half-cursing myself for a fool, in thus 
wildly thrusting my head into a squabble, I turned back and 
shut the door, saying, 

“ A very pleasant room, ma’am, but a leetle too crowded.” 

Before she could answer, the opposite door opened ; and 9 
face appeared — unwashed, unshaven, shrunken to a skeleton 
I did not recognize it at first. 

“Blessed Vargen ! butAhat Avasn’t your voice, Locke?” 

“ And who are you ?” 

“ Tear and ages ! and he don’t know Mike Kelly !” 

My first impulse was to catch him up in my arms, and 
run down stairs with him. I controlled myself however, not 
knowing how far he might be in his tyrant’s power. But his 
voluble Irish heart burst out at once : 

“ Oh ! blessed saints, take me out o’ this ! — take me out, 
for the love of Jesus ! — take me out o’ this hell, or I’ll go mad 
intirely ! Och ! will nobody have pity on poor sowls in pur- 
gatory — here in prison like negur slaves ? We’re starved to 
the bone, AA'e are, and kilt intirely with cowld.” 

And as he clutched my arm, with his long, skinny, trem- 
bling fingers, I saw that his hands and feet were all chapped 
and bleeding. Neither shoe nor stocking did he possess ; his 
only garments Avere a ragged shirt and troAvsers ; and — and, 
in horrible mockery of his own misery, a grand new flowered 
satin vest, Avhich to-morrow was to figure in some gorgeous 
shop-window ' 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILCiR AND; POET. 


191 


Uch ! Mother of Heaven !” he went on, wildly, *• when 
will I get out to the fresh air ? For five months I haven’t 
seen the blessed light of sun, nor spoken to the praste, nor ate 
a bit o’ mate, barring bread-and-butter. Shure it’s all the 
blessed sabbaths and saints’ days I’ve been a-working like a 
hay then Jew, and niver seen the insides o’ the chapel to con- 
fess my sins, and me poor sowl’s lost intirely — and they’ve 
pawned the relaver* this fifteen weeks, and not a boy of us 
iver sot foot in the street since.” « 

“ Vot’s that row ?” roared at this juncture Downes’s voice 
from below. 

“ Och, thin,” shrieked the woman, “ here’s that thief o’ 
the warld, Micky Kelly, slandhering o’ us afore the blessed 
heaven, and he owing £2. 14s. O^d. for his board an’ lodgin’, 
let alone pawn-tickets, and goin’ to rin away, the black-heart 
ed ongrateful sarpent !” And she began yelling, indiscrimi 
nately “Thieves!” “Murder!” “Blasphemy!” and such other 
ejaculations, which (the English ones at least) had not the 
slightest reference to the matter in hand. 

“ I’ll come to him !” said Downes, with an oath, and rush- 
ed stumbling up the stairs, while the poor wretch sneaked in 
again, and slammed the door to. Downes battered at it, but 
was met with a volley of curses from the men inside ; while, 
profiting by the Babel, I blew out the light, ran down-stairs, 
and got safe into the street. 

In two hours afterward, Mackaye, Porter, Crossthwaite, - 
and I were at the door, accompanied by a policeman, and a 
search-warrant. Porter had insisted on accompanying us. 
He had made up his mind that his son was at Downes’s ; 
and all representations of the smallness of his chance were 
fruitless. He worked himself up into a state of complete 
frenzy, and flourished a huge stick in a way which shocked 
the policeman’s orderly and legal notions. 

“ That may do very well down in your country, sir ; but 
you aren’t a goin’ to use that there weapon here, you know, 
not by no hact o’ Parliament as I knows on.” 

“ Ow, it’s joost a way I ha’ wi’ me.” And the stick was 
quiet for fifty yards or so, and then recommenced smashing 
imaginary skulls. 

“ You’ll do somebody a mischief, sir, with that. You’d 
much better a lend it me.” 

* A coat, we understand, which is kept by the coatless wretches in 
these sweaters’ dungeons, to be used by each of them in turn when 
they want to go out. — Editor. 


192 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Porter tucked it under his arm for fifty yards more ; and 
so on, till we reached Downes’s house. 

The policeman knocked ; and the door was opened, cai\* 
tiously by an old Jew, of a most un-“ Caucasian” cast of 
features, however “ high nosed,” as Mr. Disraeli has it. 

The policeman asked to see Michael Kelly. 

“ Michaelsh 1 I do’t know such namesh — ” But before 
the parley could go further, the farmer burst past policeman 
and Jew, and rushed into the passage, roaring, in a voice 
which made the very windows rattle, 

“ Billy Poorter ! Billy Poorter ! whor be yow ? whor be 
yow 

We all followed him up-stairs, in time to see him charging 
valiantly, with his stick for a bayonet, the small person of a 
Jew-boy, who stood at the head of the stairs in a scientific 
attitude. The young rascal planted a dozen blows in the 
huge carcase — he might as well have thumped the rhinoceros 
in the Regent’s Park ; the old man ran right over him, with- 
out stopping, and dashed up the stairs ; at the head of which 
— oh, joy ! — appeared a long, shrunken, red-haired figure, the 
tears on its dirty cheeks glittering in the candle-glare. In an 
instant, father and son were in each other’s arms. 

“ Oh, my barn ! my barn ! my barn ! my barn !” and then 
the old Hercules held him off at arm’s length, and looked at 
him with a wistful face, and hugged him again with “ My 
barn ! my barn !” He had nothing else to say. Was it not 
enough? And poor Kelly danced frantically around them, 
hurrahing ; his own sorrows forgotten in his friend’s deliver- 
ance. 

The Jew-boy shook himself, turned, and darted down-stairs 
past us ; the policeman quietly put out his foot, tripped him 
headlong, and jumping down after him, extracted from his 
grasp a heavy pocket-book. 

Ah ! my dear mothersh’s dying gift ! Oh, dear ! oh 
dear ! give it back to a poor orphansh !” 

“ Didn’t I see you take it out o’ the old ’un’s pocket — you 
young villain?” answered the maintainer of order, as ho 
shoved the book into his bosom, and stood with one foot on his 
writhing victim, a complete nineteenth-century St. Michael 

“ Let me hold him,” I said, “ while you go up-stairs.” 

“ You hold a Jew-boy ! — you hold a mad cat !” answered 
the policeman, contemptuously — and with justice — for at that 
moment Downes appeared on the first-floor landing, cursing 
and blaspheming. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


193 


“ He’s my ’prentice ! he’s rny servant ! I’ve got a bond, 
"v^dth his own hand to it, to serve me for three years. I’ll 
have the law of you — I will !” 

Then the meaning of the big stick came out. The old 
man leapt down the stairs, and seized Downes. “ You’re the 
tyrant as has locked fny barn up here !” and a thrashing com- 
menced, which it made my bones ache only to look at. 
Downes had no chance ; the old man felled him on his face 
in a couple of blows, and taking both hands to his stick, 
nowed away at him as if he had been a log. 

“ I waint hit a’s head ! I waint hit a’s head !” — whack, 
whack, “ Let me be !” — whack, whack — puff. “ It docs 
me gude, it does me gude !” puff, puff, puff — whack. “ I’ve 
been a bottling of it up for three years, come Whitsuntide !” 
— whack, whack, whack — while Mackaye and Crossthwaite 
stood coolly looking on; and the wife shut herself up in the 
side-room, and screamed murder. 

The unhappy policeman stood at his wit’s end, between 
the prisoner below, and the breach of the peace above, bel- 
lowing in vain, in the Queen’s name, to us, and to the grin- 
ning tailors on the landing. At last, as Downes’s life seemed 
in danger, he wavered ; the Jew-boy seized the moment, jump- 
ed up, upsetting the constable, dashed like an eel between 
Crossthwaite and Mackaye, gave me a back-handed blow in 
passing, which I felt for a week after, and vanished through 
the street-door, which he locked after him. 

“ Very well I” said the functionary,' rising solemnly, and 
pulling out a note-book — “Soar under left eye, nose a little 
twisted to the right, bad chilblains on the hands. You’ll 
keep till next time, young man. Now, you fat gentleman 
up there, have you done a qualifying of yourself for New- 
gatel” 

The old man had run up-stairs again, and was hugging his 
son ; but when the policeman lifted Downes, he rushed back 
to his victim, and begged like a great school-boy, for leave to 
“ bet him joost won bit moor.” 

“Let me bet un ! I’ll pay uni — I’ll pay all as my son 
owes un ! hlarcy me ! where’s my pooss ?” and so on raged 
the Babel, till we got the two poor fellows safe out of the 
nouse — we had to break open the door to do it, thanks to that 
imp of Israel. 

“ For God’s sake, take us too !” almost screamed five or 
nix other voices. 

“ They’re all in debt — every onesh ; they sha’n’t go till 

T 


194 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


they paysh, if there’s law in England,” whined t‘io old Jew, 
who had re-appeared. 

“ I’ll pay lor ’em — I’ll pay every farden, if so be as they 
treated my "boy well. Here, you, Mr. Locke, there’s the ten 
pounds as I promised you. Why, whor is my pooss ?” 

The policeman solemnly handed it to him. He took it, 
turned it over, looked at the policeman half frightened, and 
pointed with his fat thumb at Mackaye. 

“Well, he said as you was a conjurer — and sure he was 
right.” ^ 

He paid me the money. I had no mind to keep it in 
such company ; so I got the poor fellows’ pawn-tickets, and 
Crossthwaite and I took their things out lor them. When 
we returned, we found them in a group in the passage, hold- 
ing the door open, in their fear lest we should be locked up. 
or entrapped in some way. Their • spirits seemed utterly 
broken. Some three or four went off to lodge where they 
could ; the majority went up-stairs again to work. That, 
even that dungeon, was their only home — their only hope, as 
it is of thousands of “ free” Englishmen at this moment. 

We returned, and found the old man with his new-found 
prodigal sitting on his knee, as if he had been a baby. Sandy 
told me afterward, that he had scarcely kept him from carry- 
ing the young man all the way home ; he was convinced that 
the poor fellow was dying of starvation. I think really he 
was not far wrong. In the corner sat Kelly, crouched to- 
gether like a baboon, blubbering, hurrahing, invoking the 
saints, cursing the sweaters, and blessing the present company. 
We were afraid, for several days, that his wits were seriously 
aflected. 

And, in his old arm-chair, pipe' in mouth, sat good Sandy 
Mackaye, wiping his eyes with the many-colored sleeve, and 
moralizing to himself, s>otto voce: 

“ The auld Homans r lade slaves o’ their debitors ; sae did 
the Anglo-Saxons, for a good Major Cartwright has writ to 
the contrary. But I didna ken the same Christian practice 
was part o’ the Breetish constitution. Aweel, aweel — atween 
Hiot Acts, Government by Commissions, and ither little ex- 
travagants and codicils o’ Mammon’s making, it’s no that 
easy to ken, the day, what is the Breetish constitution, and 
what isn’t. Tak’ a drappie, Billy Porter, lad ?” 

“ Never again so long as I live. I’ve learnt a lesson and 
a half about that, these last few months.” 

“ Aweel, moderation’s best, but abstinence better than nae 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. - 


195 


thing. Nae man sail deprive me o’ my leeberty, but I’ll 
tempt nae man to gie up his.” And he actually put the 
whisky-bottle by into the cupboard. 

The old man and his son went home next day, promising . 
me, if I would but come to see them, “ twa hundert acres o’ 
the best partridge-shooting; and wild dooks as plenty as spar- 
rows; and to live in clover till I bust, if I liked.” And so, 
as Bunyan has it, they went oh their way, and I saw them 
no more. 




CHAPTER XXII. 

AN EMERSONIAN SERMON. 

CERTAINLY, if John Crossthwaite held the victim-of-circum- 
stance doctrine in theory, he did not allow Mike Kelly to 
plead it in practice, as an extenuation of his misdeeds. Very 
diflerent from his Owenite “ it’s-nobody’s-fault” harangues in 
the debating society, or his admiration for the teacher of 
whom my readers shall have a glimpse shortly, was his lec- 
ture that evening to the poor Irishman on “ It’s all your own 
fault.” Unhappy Kelly ! he sat there like a beaten cur, 
looking first at one of us, and then at the other, for mercy 
and finding none. As soon as Crossthwaite’s tongue was 
tired, Mackaye’s began, on the sins of drunkenness, hastiness, 
improvidence, over-trustfulness, &c., &c., and, above all, on the 
cardinal ofiensc of not having signed the protest years before, 
and spurned the dishonorable trade, as we had done. Even 
his most potent excuse that “ a boy must live somehow,” 
Crossthwaite treated as contemptuously as if he had been a 
very Leonidas, while Mackaye chimed in with, 

“ An’ ye a Papist ! ye talk o’ praying to saints an’ martyrs, 
that died in torments because they wad na do what they 
should na do ? What ha’ ye to do wi’ martyrs ? a meeser- 
able wretch that sells his soul for a mess o’ pottage — four 
slices per diem o’ thin bread and butter ? Et propter veetam 
veevendi perdere causas ! Dinna tell me o’ your hardships — 
ye’ve had your deserts — your rights were just equivalent to 
your mights, an’ so ye got them.” 

“Faix then, Misther Mackaye, darlint, an’ whin did I 
desarve to pawn me own goose an’ board, an’ sit looking at 
the spidthers for the want o’ them ?” 

“Pawn his ain goose ? Pawn himsel’ Ivpawn his needle — 
gin it had been worth the pawning, they’d ha’ ta’en it. An 
yet there’s a command in Deuteronomy, Ye shall na tak’ the 
millstone in pledge, for it’s a man’s life ; nor yet keep his 
raiment owre night, but gie it the puir body back, that he 
may sleep in his ain claes, an’ bless ye. O — but pawn 
brokers dinna care for blessings — na marketable value in them 
v'hatsoever.” 

“ And the shopkeeper,” said I, “ in the ‘ Arabian Nights/ 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


197 


refuses to take the fisherman’s net in pledge, because he gets 
his living thereby.” 

“ Ech ! hut, laddie, they were puir legal Jews, under car- 
nal ordinances, an’ daur na even tak an honest five per cent, 
interest for their money. An’ the baker o’ Bagdad, wiiy he 
was a benighted heathen, ye ken, and deceivit by that fause 
prophet, Mahomet, to his eternal damnation, or he wad never 
iia’ gone aboot to fancy a fisherman was his brither ” 

“Faix, an’ ain’t we all brothers?” asked Kelly. 

“ Ay, and no,” said Sandy, with an expression which 
would have been a smile, but for its depth of bitter earnest- 
ness ; “ brethern in Christ, my laddie.” 

“ An’ ain’t that all over the same ?” 

“ Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they’d say 
brothers, be sure ; but because they don’t mean brothers at 
a’, they say brethern — ye’ll mind, brethern — to soun' anti- 
quate, an’ professional, an’ perfunctory-like, for fear it should 
be owre real, an’ practical, an’ startling, an’ a’ that ; and 
then jist limit it down wi’ a ‘ in Christ,’ for fear o’ owre wide 
applications, and a’ that. But 

‘ For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 

It’s cornin’ yet for a’ that, 

When man an’ man, the warld owre, 

Shall brothers be for a’ that — 

An’ na brithren ony mail* at a’ !” 

“ An’ didn’t the blessed Jesus die for all ?” 

What ? for heretics, Micky ?’” 

“ Bedan thin, an’ I forgot that intirely !” 

“ Of course you did ' It’s strange, laddie,” said he turning 
to me, “ that that Name suld be every where, fra the thun- 
derers o’ Exeter Ha’ to this puir feckless Paddy, the watch- 
word o’ exclusiveness. I’m thinking ye’ll no find the work- 
men believe in ’t, till somebody can fin’ the plan o’ making it 
the sign o’ universal comprehension. Gin I had na seen in 
my youth that a brither in Christ meant less a thousandfold 
than a brither out o’ him, I might ha’ believit the noo — we’ll 
no say Avhat. I’ve an owre great organ o’ marvelousness, 
an’ o’ veneration too, I’m afeard.” 

“ Ah,” said Crossthwaito, “ you should come and hear Mr. 
Windrush to-night, about the all-embracing benevolence of 
the Deity, and the abomination of limiting it by all those nar- 
row creeds and dogmas.” 

“ An’ wha’s Meester Windrush, then ?” 

“ Oh, he’s an American ; he was a Calvinist preachei 


198 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


originally, I believe ; but, as he told us last Sunday evening 
he soon cast away the worn-out vestures of an obsolete faith, 
which were fast becoming only crippling fetters.” 

“ An’ ran oot sarkless on the public, eh ? I’m afeard 
there’s mony a man else that throws awa’ the gude auld 
plaid o’ Scots Puritanism, an’ is unco fain to cover his naked- 
ness wi’ ony cast popinjay’s feathers he can forgather wi’. 
Aweel, aweel — a puir priestless age it is, the noo. We’ll 
e’en gang hear him the nicht, Alton, laddie ; ye ha’ na dark- 
ened the kirk door this mony a day — nor I neither, mair by 
token.” 

“ It was too true. I had utterly given up the whole prob- 
lem of religion as insoluble. I believed in poetry, science, 
and democracy — and they were enough for me then ; enough, 
at least, to leave a mighty hunger in my heart, I knew not 
for what. And as for Mackaye, though brought up, as he 
told me, a rigid Scotch Presbyterian, he had gradually ceased 
to attend the church of his fathers. 

“ It was no the kirk o’ his fathers — the auld God-trusting 
kirk that Clavers dragoonit down by burns and muirsides. It 
was a’ gane dead an’ dry; a piece of Auld-Bailey barristration 
anent soul-saving dodges. What did he want wi’ proofs o’ 
the being o’ God, an’ o’ the doctrine o’ original sin ? He 
could see eneugh o’ them ayont the shop-door, ony tide. They 
made puir Babbie Burns an anything-arian, wi’ their blethers, 
an’ he was near gaun the same gate.” 

And, besides, he absolutely refused to enter any place of 
worship where there were pews. “ He wad na follow after a 
multitude to do evil ; he wad na gang before his Maker wi’ 
a lee in his right hand, Nae wonder folks were so afraid o’ 
the names of equality an’ britherhood, when they kicked them 
out e’en o’ the kirk o’ God. Pious folks may ca’ me a sinfu 
auld Atheist. They winna gang to a harmless stage-play — 
an’ richt they — for fear o’ countenancing the sin that’s dune 
there ; an’ I winna gang to the kirk, for fear o’ countenancing 
the sin that’s dune there, by putting down my hurdies on that 
stool o’ antichrist, a haspit pew !” 

I was, therefore, altogether surprised at the promptitude 
with which he agreed to go and hear Crossthwaite’s new-found 
prophet. His reasons for so doing may be, I think, gathered 
from the conversation toward the end of this chapter. 

Well, we went; and I, for my part, was charmed with 
Mr. Windrush’s eloquence. His style, which was altogether 
Emersonian, quite astonished me .by its alternate bursts of 


AITON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


199 


what 1 considered Vrilliant declamation, and of forcible epi- 
grammatic antithesis. 1 do not deny that I was a little 
startled by some of his doctrines, and suspected that he had 
not seen much of St. Giles’s cellars or tailors’ workshop’.s 
either, when he talked of sin as “ only a lower form of good.” 
“ Nothing,” he informed us, “ was produced in nature without 
pain and disturbance ; and what we had been taught to call 
sin, was, in fact, nothing hut the birth-throes attendant on 
the progress of the species. As for the devil, Novalis, indeed, 
had gone so far as to suspect him to be a necessary illusion. 
Novalis was a mystic, and tainted by the old creeds. The 
illusion was not necessary — it was disappearing before the 
fast-approaching meridian light of philosophic religion. Like 
the myths of Christianity, it had grown up in an age of su- 
perstition, when men, blind to the wondrous order of the uni- 
verse, believed that supernatural beings, like the Homeric gods, 
actually interfered in the affairs of mortals. Science had re- 
vealed the irrevocability of the laws of nature — was man 
alone to be exempt from them ? No. The time would come 
when it would be as obsolete an absurdity to talk of the 
temptation of a fiend, as it was now to talk of the wehr- 
wolf, or the angel of the thunder-cloud. The metaphor might 
remain, doubtless, as a metaphor, in the domain of poetry, 
whose office was to realize, in objective symbols, the subject 
ive ideas of the human intellect ; but philosophy, and the pure 
sentiment of religion, which found all things, even God him- 
self, in the recesses of its own enthusiastic heart must abjure 

such a notion 

“ What !” he asked again, “ shall all nature be a harmoni- 
ous whole, reflecting, in every drop of dew which gems the 
footsteps of the morning, the infinite love and wisdom of its 
Maker, and man alone be excluded from his part in that con- 
cordant choir ? Yet such is the doctrine of the advocates of 
free-will, and of sin — its phantom-bantling. Man disobey ’his 
Maker ! disarrange and break the golden wheels and, springs 
of the infinite machine ! The thought were blasphemy ! — 
impossibility ! All things fulfill their destiny ; and so does 
man, in a higher or lower sphere of being. Shall I punish 
the robber I Shall I curse the profligate 1 As soon destroy 
the toad, because my partial taste may judge him ugly ; or 
doom to hell, for his carnivorous appetite, the muscalonge of 
my native lakes ! Toad is not horrible to toad, or thief to 
thief. Philanthropists or statesmen may environ him with 
more genial circumsia.nces, and so enable his propensities to 


200 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


work more directly for the good of society ; but to punish him 
— to punish nature for daring to be nature ! — Never ! I may 
thank the Upper Destinies that they have not made me as 
other men are — that they have endowed me with nobler in- 
stincts, a more delicate conformation than the thief; but 1 
have my part +0 play and he has his. Why should we wish 
to be other than the All-wise has made us ?” 

“ Fine doctrine that,” grumbled Sandy ; “ gin ye’ve first 
made up your mind wi’ the Pharisee, that ye are no like ither 
men.” 

“ Shall I pray, then ? For what ? I will coax none, flat- 
ter none — not even the Supreme ! I will not be absurd enough 
to wish to change that order, by which sun and stars, saints 
and sinners, alike fulfill their destinies. There is one comfort, 
my friends ; coax and flatter, as we will, he will not hear 
us.” 

“Pleasant for puir deevils like us !” quoth Mackaye. 

“ What then remains] Thanks, thanks — not of words, but 
of actions. Worship is a life, not a ceremony. He who would 
honor the Supreme, let him cheerfully succumb to the destiny, 
which the Supreme has allotted, and like the shell or the 
flower” — (“ or the pick-pocket,” added Mackaye, almost audi* 
bly), “become the happy puppet of the universal impulse. He 
who would honor Christ, let him become a Christ himself! 
Theodore of Mopsuestia — born, alas ! before his time — a 
prophet for whom as yet no audience stood ready in the am- 
phitheatre of souls — ‘ Christ !’ he was won’t to say ; ‘ I can 
become Christ myself, if I will.’ Become thou Christ, my 
brother ! He is an idea — the idea of utter submission — abne- 
gation of his own fancied will before the supreme necessities. 
Fulfill that idea, and thou art he ! Deny thyself, and then 
only wilt thou be a reality ; for thou hast no self If thou 
hadst a self, thou wouldst but lie in denying it — and would 
The Being thank thee for denying what he had given thee ? 
But thou hast none ! God is circumstance, and thou his 
creature ! Be content ! Fear not, strive not, change not, re- 
pent not ! Thou art nothing ! be nothing, and thou becomest 
a part of all things !” 

And so Mr. Windrush ended his discourse, which Cross- 
thwaite had been all the while busily taking down in short- 
hand, for the edification of the readers of a certain periodical 
and also for those of this my Life. 

I plead guilty to having been entirely carried away by what 
I heard. There was so much which was true, so much more 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


201 


which seemed true, so much which it would have been con- 
venient to believe true, and all put so eloquently and originally^ 
as I then considered, that, in short, I was in raptures, and so 
was poor dear Crossthwaite ; and as we walked home, we 
dinned Mr. Windrush’s praises one into each of Mackaye’s 
ears. The old man, hoAvever, paced on silent and meditative 
At last — 

“ A hunder sects or so in the land o’ Gret Britain ; an’ a 
hunder or so single preachers, each man a sect of his ain ! an’ 
this the last fashion ! Last indeed I The moon of Calvin- 
ism’s far gone in the fourth quarter, when it’s come to the 
like o’ that. Truly, the soul-saving business is a’thegither 
fa’ll to a low ebb, as Master Tummas says somewhere !” 

“ Well, hut,” asked Crossthwaite, “ was not that man, at 
least, splendid ?” 

“An’ hoo much o’ thae gran’ objectives an’ subjectives did 
ye comprehcn’, then, Johnnie, my man ?” 

“Quite enough for me,” answered John in a somewhat net- 
tled tone. 

“ An, sae did I.’ 

“But you ought to hear him often. You can’t judge of 
his system from one sermon, in this way.” 

“ Seestem ! and what’s that like ?” 

“ Why, he has a plan for uniting all sects and parties, on 
the one broad fundamental ground of the unity of God as re- 
vealed by science — ” 

“ Verra like uniting o’ men by just pu’ing aff their claes, 
and telling ’em, ‘ There, ye’re a’ hrithers noo, on the one broad 
fundamental principle o’ want o’ breeks.’ ” 

“ Of course,” went on Crossthwaite, without taking notice 
of this interruption, “ he allows full liberty of conscience. All 
he wishes for is the emancipation of intellect. He will allow 
every one, he says, to realize that idea to himself, by the rep- 
resentations which suit him best.” 

“ An’ so he has no objection to a wee playing at Papistry, 
gin a man finds it good to tickle up his soul?” 

“ Ay, he did speak of that — what did he call it ? Oh ' 
‘ one of the ways in which the Christian idea naturally em- 
bodied itself in imaginative minds ! but the higher intellects, 
of course, would want fewer helps of that kind. They would 
see — ’ ay, that was it — ‘ the pure white light of truth, without 
requiring those colored refracting media.’ ” 

“ That wad depend muckle on whether the light o’ truth 
chose or not — I’m thinking. But, Johnnie, lad — guide us 


202 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

and save us ! whaur got ye a’ these gran’ outlandish words 
the nicht ?” 

“Haven’t I been taking down every one of these lectures' 
for the press ?” 

“ The press gang to the father o’t — and you too, for lending 
your han’ in the matter — lor a mair accursed aristocrat I 
never heerd, sin’ I first ate haggis. Oh, ye gowk — ye gowk I 
Dinna ye see what be the upshot o’ siccan doctrine ? That 
every puir fellow as has no gret brains in his head will be left 
to his superstition, an’ his ignorance, to fulfill the lusts o’ his 
flesh ; while the few that are geniuses, or fancy themselves 
sae, are to ha’ the monopoly o’ this private still o’ philosophy 
— these carbonari, illurninati, vehmgericht, Samothracian mys- 
teries o’ bottled moonshine. An’ when that comes to pass, 
ril just gang back to my schule and my catechism, and begin 
again wi’ ‘ who was born o’ the Virgin Mary, suffered oonder 
Pontius Pilate !’ Hech ! lads, there’s no subjectives and 
objectives there, na beggarly, windy abstractions, but joost a 
plain fact, that God cam’ down to look for puir bodies, instead 
o’ leaving puir bodies to gang looking for Him. An’ here’s a 
pretty place to be left looking for Him in — between gin-shops 
and gutters ! A pretty gospel for the publicans an’ harlots, 
to tell ’em that if their bairns are canny eneugh, they may 
possibly some day be allowed to believe that there is one God, 
and not twa ! And then, by way of practical application — 

‘ Hech ! my dear, starving, simple brothers, ye manna be sae 
owre conscientious, and gang fashing yourselves anent being 
brutes, an’ deevils, for the gude God’s made ye sae, and He’s 
verra weel content to see ye sae, gin ye be content or no.” 

“ Then, do you believe in the old doctrines of Christianity ?” 
I asked. 

“ Dinna speir what I believe in. I canna tell ye. I’ve 
been seventy years trying to believe in God, and to meet an- 
either man that believed in him. So I’m just like the Quaker 
o’ the town o’ Redcross, that met by himself every First-day 
in his ain hoose.” 

“Well, but,” I asked again, “is not complete freedom of 
thought a glorious aim — to emancipate man’s noblest part — 
the intellect — from the trammels of custom and ignorance ]” 

“ Intellect — intellect !” rejoined he, according to his fashion, 
catching one up at a word, and playing on that in order to 
answer, not what one said, but what one’s words led to. 
“ I’m sick o’ all Ihe talk anent intellect I hear noo. An’ 
what’s the use o’ intellect ? ‘ Aristocracy o’ intellect,’ they 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


203 


cry. Curse a’ aristocracies — intellectual anes, as weel as 
anes o’ birth, or rank, or money ! What ! will I ca^ a man 
my superior, because he’s cleverer than mysel’ 'I will I boo 
down to a bit o’ brains, ony mair than to a stock or a stane ? 
Let a man prove himsel’ better than me, my laddie — honest- 
er, humbler, kinder, wi’ mair sense o’ the duty o’ man, an’ 
the weakness o’ man — and that man I’ll acknowledge — that 
man’s my king, my leader, though he war as stupid as Eppe 
Dalgleish, that could na count five on her fingers, and "yet 
keepit her drucken father by her ain hand’s labor, for twenty- 
three yeers.” '' 

We could not agree to all this, but we made a. rule of 
never contradicting the old sage in one of his excited moods, 
for fear of bringing on a week’s silent fit-— a state which gen- 
erally ended in his smoking himself into a bilious melancholy ; 
but I made up my mind to be henceforth a frequent auditor 
of Mr. Windrush’s oratory. 

“An’ sae the deevil’s dead!” said Sandy, half to himself, 
as he sat crooning and smoking that night ovet the fire. 
“ Gone at last, puir fallow ! an’ he sae little appreciated, too ! 
Every gowk laying his ain sins on Nickie’s back. Puir 
Nickie ! verra like that much misunderstood politeecian, Mr. 
John Cade, as Charles Buller ca’d him in the Hoose o’ Com- 
mons — an’ he to be dead at last ! The warld ’ll seem quite 
unco without his auld-farrant phizog on the streets. Aweel, 
aweel — aiblins he’s but shammin.’ 

When pleasant Spring came on apace, 

And showers began to fa’, 

John Barleycorn got up again, 

And sore surprised them a’. 

At ony rate, I’d no bury him till he began smell a wee 
strong, like. It’s a grewsome thing, is premature interment, 
Alton, laddie !” 


CHAPTER XXIII, 


THE FREEDOM OF THE PE ESS. 


But all this while, my slavery to Mr. O’Flynn’s party* 
spirit and coarseness was becoming daily more and more in- 
tolerable : an explosion was inevitable. ; and an explosion 
came. 

Mr. O’Flynn found out that I had been staying at Cam- 
bridge, and at a cathedral city too ; and it was quite a god- 
send to him to find any one who knew a word about the in- 
stitutions at which he had been railing weekly for years. So 
nothing would servo him, but my writing a set of articles on 
the Universities, as a prelude to one on the Cathedral Estab- 
lishments. In vain I pleaded the shortness of my stay there, 
and the smallness of my information. 

“ Och, were not abuses notorious ? And couldn’t I get 
them up out of any Radical paper — and just put in a little 
of my own observations, and a dashing personal cut or two, 
to spice the thing up, and give it an original look ? and if I 
did not choose to write that — why,” with an enormous oath, 
“I should write nothing.” So — for I was growing weaker 
and weaker, and indeed my hack- writing was breaking down 
my moral sense, as it does that of most of men — I complied ; 
and burning with vexation, feeling myself almost guilty of a 
breach of trust toward those from whom I had received nothing 
but kindness, I scribbled off my first number and sent it to 
the editor — to see it appear next week, three-parts rewritten, 
and every fact of my own furnishing twisted and misapplied, 
till the whole thing was as vulgar and commonplace a piece 
of rant as ever disgraced the people’s cause. And all this, in 
spite of a solemn promise, confirmed by a volley of oaths, that 
I “should say what I liked, and speak my whole mind, as 
one who had seen things with his own eyes had a rio-ht to 
do.” 


Furious, I set off to the editor ; and not only my pride, but 
what literary conscience I had left, was stirred to the bottom 
by seeing myself made, whether I would or not, a blackguard 
and a slanderer. 

As it was ordained, Mr. O’Flynn was gone out for an hour 
or two ; and, unable to settle down to any work till I had 
fought my battle with him fairly out, I wandered onward 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 205 

toward the West-end, staring into print-shop windows, and 
meditating on many things. 

As it was ordained, also, I turned up Regent-street, and 
into Langham-place ; when, at the door of All-Souls Church, 
behold a crowd, and a long string of carriages arriving, and 
all the pomp and glory of a grand wedding. 

I joined the crowd from mere idleness, and somehow found 
myself in the first rank, just as the bride was stepping out of 
the carriage — it was Miss Staunton ; and the old gentleman 
who handed her out was no other than the dean. They 
were, of course, far too deeply engaged to recognize insignifi- 
cant little me, so that I could stare as thoroughly to my 
heart’s content as any of the butcher-boys and nursery-maids 
around me. 

She was closely vailed — but not too closely to prevent my 
seeing her magnificent lip and nostril curling with pride, re- 
solve, rich tender passion. Her glorious black-brown hair — 
the true “purple locks” which Homer so often talks of — rolled 
down beneath her vail in great heavy ringlets ; and with her 
tall and rounded figure, and step as firm and queenly as if she 
were going to a throne, she seemed to me the very ideal of 
those magnificent Eastern Zubeydehs and Nourmahals, whom 
I used to dream of after reading the “ Arabian Nights.” 

As they entered the door-way, almost touching me, she 
looked round, as if for some one. The dean whispered some- 
thing in his gentle, stately way, and she answered by one of 
those looks so intense, and yet so bright, so full of unutterable 
depths of meaning and emotion, that, in spite of all my antip- 
athy, I felt an admiration akin to awe thrill through me, and 
gazed after her so intently, that Lillian — Lillian herself — was 
at my side, and almost passed me before I was aware of it. 

Yes, there she was, the foremost among a bevy of fair girls, 
“ herself the fairest far,” all April smiles and tears, golden 
curls, snowy rosebuds, and hovering clouds of lace — a fairy 
queen ; but yet — but yet — how shallow that hazel eye, how 
empty of meaning those delicate features, compared with the 
strength and intellectual richness of the ‘face which had pro- 
ceed her ! 

It was too true — I had never remarked it before; but now 
it flashed across mo like lightning — and like lightning vanish- 
ed ; for Lillian’s eye caught mine, and there v/as the faintest 
spark of a smile of recognition, and pleased surprise, and a 
nod. I blushed scarlet with delight; some servant girl or 
other, who stood next to me, had seen it too — quick-eyed that 


20G 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


women are — and was looking curiously at me. I turned, 1 
know not why, in my delicious shame, and jolunged through 
the crowd to hide I knew not what. 

I walked on — poor fool !— in an ecstasy ; the whole world 
was transfigured in my eyes, and virtue and wisdom beamed 
from every face I passed. The omnibus-horses were racers, 
and the drivers — were they not my brothers of the people ? 
The very policemen looked sprightly and philanthropic. I 
shook hands earnestly with the crossing-sweeper of the Regent- 
circus, gave him my last two-pence, and rushed on, like a young 
David, to exterminate that Philistine O’Flynn. 

Ah well ! I was a great fool, as others too have been ; but 
yet, that little chance-meeting did really raise me. It made 
me sensible that I was made for better things than low abuse 
of the higher classes. It gave me courage to speak out, and 
act without fear of consequences, once at least in that con- 
fused facing-both-ways period of my life. O woman I woman ! 
only true missionary of civilization and brotherhood, and gen- 
tle, forgiving charity ; it is in thy power, and perhaps in thine 
only, to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to 
the captives ! One real lady, who should dare to stoop, what 
might she not do with us — with our sisters ? If — 

There are hundreds, answers the reader, who do stoop. 
Elizabeth Fry was a lady, well-born, rich, educated, and she 
has many scholars. 

True, my dear readers, true — and may God bless her and 
her scholars. Do you think the working-men forget them ? 
But look at St. Giles’s, or Spitalfields, or Shadwell, and say, 
is not the harvest plentiful, and the laborers, alas! few? No 
one asserts that nothing is done ; the question is, is enough 
done ? Does the supply of mercy meet the demand of miserv 
Walk into the next court and see ! 

I found Mr. O’Flynn in his sanctum, busy with paste and 
scissors, in the act of putting in a string of advertisements— 
indecent French novels. Atheistic tracts, quack medicines, 
and slopsellers’ puffs'; and commenced with as much dignity 
as I could muster, « 

“ What on earth, do you mean, sir, by re-writing my 
article?” ^ 

** What — (in the other place) — do you mean by giving me 
the trouble of re-writing it ? Me head’s splitting now with 
sitting up, cutting out, and putting in. Poker o’ Moses ! but 
ye’d given it an intirely aristocratic tendency. What did ye 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND J^OET. 


207 


mane’' (and tkree or four oaths rattled out) '‘by talking about 
the pious intentions of the original founders, and the demo- 
cratic tendencies of monastic establishmentf) ?” 

“ I wrote it because I thought it.” 

“ Is that any reason ye should write it 1 And there was 
another bit, too — it made my hair stand on end when 1 saw 
it, to think how near I was sending the copy to press with- 
out looking at it — something about a French Socialist, and 
Church Property.” 

“ Oh ! you mean, I suppose, the story of the French Social- 
ist, who told me that church property was just the only prop- 
erty in England which he would spare, because it was the 
only one which had definite* duties attached to it ; that the 
real devourers of the people were not the bishops, who, how- 
ever rich, were at least bound to work in return for their 
riches, but the landlords and millionaires, who refuse to 
confess the duties of property, while they raved about its 
rights.” 

“ Bedad, that’s it ; and pretty doctrine, too I” 

“ But it’s true ; it’s an entirely new, and a very striking 
notion, and I consider it my duty to mention it.” 

“ Thrue ! What the devil does that matter ? There’s a 
time to speak the truth, and a time not, isn’t there ? It’ll 
make a grand hit, now, in a leader upon the Irish Church 
question, to back the prastes against the landlords. But if 
I’d let that in as it stood, bedad, I’d have lost three-parts of 
my subscribers the next week. Every soul of the -Indepen- 
dents, let alone the Chartists, would have bid me good morn- 
ing. Now do, like a good boy, give us something more the 
right thing next time. Draw it strong. — A good drunken 
supper-party and a police row ; if ye haven’t seen one, get it 
up out of Peter Priggins — or Laver might do, if the other 
wasn’t convenient. That’s Dublin to be sure, but one uni- 
versity’s just like another. And give us a seduction or two, 
and a brace of Dons carried home drunk from Barnwell by 
the Procthors.” 

“ Really I never saw any thing of th6 kind ; and as for 
profligacy among the Dons, 1 don’t believe it exists. I’ll call 
them idle, and bigoted, and careless of the morals of the young 
men, because I know that they are so ; but as for any thing 
more, I believe them to be as sober, respectable a set of Phar- 
isees as the world ever saw.” 

Mr. O’Flynn was waxing warm, and the bully-vein began 
fast to show itself. 


208 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ I don’t care a curse, sir! My subscribers won’t stand it, 
and they shan’t ! 1 am a man of business, sir, and a man of 

the world, sir, and faith that’s more than you are, and 1 know 
what Avill sell the paper, and by J — s I’ll let no upstart spal- 
peen dictate to me !” 

“ Then I’ll tell you what, sir,” quoth I, waxing warm in 
my turn, “ I don’t know which are the greater rogues, you or 
your subscribers. You a patriot ! You are a humbug. Look 
at those advertisements, and deny it if you can. Crying out 
ibr education, and helping to debauch the public mind with 
Voltaire’s ‘ Candide,’ and Eugene Sue — swearing by Jesus, 
and puffing Atheism and blasphemy — yelling at a quack gov- 
ernment, quack law, quack priesthoods, and then dirtying your 
fingers with half-crowns for advertising Holloway’s ointment, 
and Parr’s life pills — shrieking about slavery of labor to cap- 
ital, and inserting Moses & Son’s doggrel — ranting about 
searching investigations and the march of knowledge, and 
concealing every fact which can not be made to pander to the 
passions of your dupes — extolling the freedom of the press, and 
showing yourself in your own office a tyrant and a censor of 
the press. You a patriot ! You the people’s friend ! You 
are doing every thing in your power to blacken the people’s 
cause in the eyes of their enemies. You are simply a hum- 
bug, a hypocrite, and a scoundrel ; and so I bid you good 
morning.” 

Mr. O’Flynn had stood, during this harrangue, speechless 
with passion, those loose lips of his wreathing like a pair of 
earth-worms. It was only when I stopped that he regained 
his breath, and with a volley of incoherent oaths, caught up 
his chair and hurled it at my head. Luckily, I had seen 
enough of his temper already, to keep my hand on the lock of 
the door for the last five minutes. I darted out of the room 
quicker than I ever did out of one before or since. The chair 
took efiect on the luckless door ; and as I threw a flying 
glance behind me, I saw one leg sticking through the middle 
pannel, in a way that augured ill for my skull, had it been in 
the way of Mr. O'Flynn’s fury. 

I ran home to Mackaye in a state of intense self-glorifica- 
tion, and told him the whole story. He chuckled, he crowed, 
he hugged me to his bosom. 

“ Leeze me o’ ye ! but I keimed ye were o’ the true Norse 
blude after a’ ! 


209 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

Oh, but I hae expecldt ii this month an’ mair! Oh, but 1 
prophesied it, Johnnie!” 

“ Then, why in Heaven’s name did you introduce me tc 
such a scoundrel ?” 

“ I sent ye to schule, lad, I sent ye to schule. Ye wad na 
be ruled by me. Ye tuk me for a puir doited auld misan- 
thrope ; an’ I thocht to gie ye the meat ye lusted after, an’ 
fill ye wi’ the fruit o’ your ain desires. An’ noo that ye’ve 
gane doon into the fire o’ temptation, an’ conquered, here’s 
your reward standin’ ready. Special prawvidences ! — wha 
can doot them ? I ha’ had mony — miracles I might ca’ 
them, to sec how they cam’ just when I was gaun daft v/i’ 
despair.” 

And then he told me that the editor of a popular journal, 
of the Howittand Eliza Cook -school, had called on me that 
morning, and promised me work enough, and pay enough, to 
meet all present difficulties. 

I did indeed accept the curious coincidence, if not as a 
reward for an act of straightforwardness, in which I saw no 
merit, at least, as proof that the upper powers had not alto- 
gether forgotten me. I found both the editor and his periodi- 
cal, as I should have wished them, temperate and sunny — 
somewhat clap-trap and sentimental, perhaps, and afraid of 
speaking out, as all parties are, but still willing to allow my 
fancy free range in light fictions, descriptions of foreign coun- 
tries, scraps of showy rose-pink morality, and such like ; which, 
though they had no more power against the raging mass of 
crime, misery, and discontent, around, than a peacock’s feather 
against a three-decker, still were all genial, graceful, ‘kindly, 
humanizing, and soothed my discontented and impatient heart 
in the work of composition. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE TOWNMAN’S SERMON TO THE GOWNSMAN. 

One morning in February a few days after this explosion, I 
was on the point of starting to go to the dean’s house about 
that weary list of subscribers, which seemed destined never to 
be filled up, when my cousin George burst in upon -me. He 
was in the highest good spirits at having just taken a double 
first-class at Cambridge ; and after my congratulations, sin- 
cere and hearty enough, were over, he offered to accompany 
me to that reverend gentleman’s house. 

He said, in an off-hand Way, that he had no particular 
business there, but he thought it just as well to call on the 
dean and mention his success, in case the old fellow should 
not have heard of it. 

“For you see,” he said, “ I’m a sort of 'protege, both on my 
own account and on Lord Lynedale’s — Ellerton, he is now — 
you know he’s just married to the dean’s niece. Miss Staunton 
— and Ellerton’s a capital fellow — promised me a living as 
soon as I’m in priest’s orders. So my cue is now,” he went 
on, as we walked down the Strand together, “ to get ordained 
as fast as ever I can.” 

“ But,” I asked, “ have you read much for ordination, or 
seen much of what a clergyman’s work should be?” 

“ Oh ! as for that — you know it isn’t one out of ten who’s 
ever entered a school, or a cottage even, except to light his 
cigar, before he goes into the church : and as for the examina- 
tion, that’s all humbug ; any man may cram it all up in a 
month — and thanks to King’s College, I knew all I wanted 
to know before I went to Cambridge. And I shall be three- 
and-twenty by Trinity Sunday, and then in I go, neck or 
nothing. Only the confounded bore is, that this Bishop of 
London won’t give one a title — won’t let any man into his 
diocese, who has not been ordained two years ; and so I shall 
be shoved down into some poking little country-curacy, with- 
out a chance of making play before the world, or getting 
myself known at all. Horrid bore ! isn’t it ?” 

“I think,” I said, “considering what London is just now 
the bishop’s regulation seems to be one of the best specimens 
of episcopal wisdom that I’ve heard of for some time.” 

“ Great bore for me, though, all the same ; for I must make 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


21 ] 


a name, I can tell you, if I intend to get on. A person must 
work like a horse nowadays, to succeed at all ; and Lyne- 
dale’s a desperately particular fellow, with all sorts of outre 
notions about people’s duties, and vocations, and heaven knows 
what.” 

“ Well,” I said, “ my dear cousin, and have you no high 
notions of a clergyman’s vocation ? because we — I mean the 
working-men — have. It’s just their high idea of what a 
clergyman should be, which makes them so furious at clergy- 
men for being what they are.” 

“ It’s a queer way of showing their respect to the priest- 
hood,” he answered, “ to do all they can to exterminate it.” 

“ I dare say they are liable, like other men, to confound the 
thing with its abuses ; but if they hadn’t some dim notion 
that the thing might be made a good thing in itself, you may 
depend upon it they would not rave against those abuses so 
fiercely.” (The reader may see that I had not forgotten my 
conversation with Miss Staunton.) “ And,” thought I to 
myself, “is it not you, and such as you, who do so incorporate 
the abuses into the system, that one really can not tell which 
is which, and longs to shove the whole thing aside as rotten 
to the core, and make a trial of something new?” 

“ Well, but,” I said, again returning to the charge, for the 
subject w’as altogether curious and interesting to me, “ do you 
really believe the doctrines of the Prayer-book, George ?” 

“ Believe them !” he answ'ered, in a tone of astonishment, 
“ why not ? I was brought up a Churchman, whatever my 
parents were ; I was always intended for the ministry. I’d 
sign the Thirty-nine Articles now, against any man in the 
three kingdoms ; and as for all the proofs out of Scripture and 
Church History, I’ve known them ever since I was sixteen 
— I’D get them all up again in a week as fresh as ever.” 

“ But,” I rejoined, astonished in my turn at my cousin’s 
notion of what belief was, “ have you any personal faith ? you 
know what I mean — I hate using cant words — but inward 
experience of the truth of all these great ideas, which, true or 
false, you will have to preach and teach ? Would you live 
by them, die for them, as a patriot would for his country, 
now ?” 

“ My dear fellow, I dont know any thing about all those 
Method istical, mystical, Calvinistical inward experiences, 
and all that. I’m a Churchman, remember, and a High 
Churchman, too ; and the doctrine of the Church is, that 
children are regenerated in holy baptism ; and there’s not the 


212 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


least doubt, from the authority both of Scripture and tho 
fithers, that that's the — ” 

“For heaven’s sake,” I said, “no polemical discussions! 
Whether you’re right or wrong, that’s not what I’m talking 
about. What I wa’nt to know is this : You are going to 
teach people about God and Jesus Christ. Do you delight 
in God ? Do you love Jesus Christ ? Never mind what 1 
do, or think, or believe. W^hat do you do, George ?” 

“ Well, my dear fellow’’, if you take Things in that way, you 
know, of course — ” and he dropped his voice into that pecu- 
liar tone, by which all sects seem to think they show their 
reverence ; w'hile to me, as to most other working-men, it 
never seemed any thing but a symbol of the separation and 
discrepancy between their daily thoughts and their religious 
ones — “ of course, we don’t any of us think of these things 
half enough, and I’m sure I wish I could be more earnest 
than I am ; but I can only hope it will come in time. " The 
Church holds that there’s a grace given in ordination ; and 
really — really, I do hope and wash to do my duty — indeed, 
one can’t help doing it ; one is so pushed on by the immense 
competition tor preferment ; an idle parson hasn’t a chance 
nowadays.” 

“But,” I asked again, half-laughing, half-disgusted, “do you 
know what your duty is ?” 

“ Bless you, my good fellow, a man can’t go wTong there. 
Carry out the Church-system; that’s the thing — all laid 
dowm by rule and method. A man has but to work out that 
— and it’s the only one for the low^er classes, I'm convinced.” 

“ Strange,” I said, “ that they have from the first been so 
little of that opinion, that every attempt to enforce it, for the 
last three hundred years, has ended either in persecution or 
revolution.” 

“ Ah ! that was all those vile Puritans’ fault. They 
w’ould’nt give the Church a chance of showing her powers.” 

“ What ! not w’hen she had it all her own w'ay, during the 
whole eighteenth century ?” 

“ Ah ! but things are very different now. The clergy are 
awakened now to the real beauty of the Catholic machinery ; 
and you have no notion how much is doing in church-building, 
and schools, and societies of every sort and kind. It is quite 
incredible what is being done now for the lower orders bv the 
Church.” 

“ I believe,” I said, “ that the clergy are exceedingly im- 
proved ; and I believe, too, that the men to whom they owe 


ALTON LOCKE. TAILOR AND POET. 


2J3 


all theii- improvement, are the Wesleys, and Whitfields — in 
short, the very men whom they drove one by one out of the 
Church, from persecution or disgust. And I do think it 
strange, that if so much is doing for the lower classes, the 
working-men who form the mass of the lower classes, are just 
those who scarcely feel the effects of it ; w^hile the churches 
seem to be filled with children, and rich and respectable, to 
the almost entire exclusion of the adult lower classes. A 
strange religion this !” I went on, “ and, to judge by its 
effects, a very different one from that preached in Judea eight- 
een hundred years ago, if w^e are to believe the Gospel story.” 

“ What on earth do you mean ? Is not the Church of 
England the very purest form of Apostolic Christianity'?” 

“ It may be — and so may the other sects. But, somehow, 
in Judea, it was the publicans and harlots who pressed into 
the kingdom of heaven ; it was the common people who 
heard Christ gladly. Christianity, then, was a movement in 
the hearts of the lower order. But now, my dear fellow, you 
rich, who used to be told in St. James’s time, to w'eep and 
howl, have turned the tables upon us poor. It is you who 
are talking, all day long, of converting us. Look at any 
place of worship you like, orthodox and heretical. Who fill 
the pews % the outcast and the reprobate % No ! the Phari- 
sees and the covetous, who used to deride Christ, fill His 
churches, and say still ‘ This people, these masses, who know 
not the Gospel, are accursed.’ And the universal feeling, as 
far as I can judge, seems to be, not ‘ how hardly shall they 
who have,’ but how hardly shall they who have not ‘riches 
enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ ” 

“ Upon my word,” said he, laughing, “ I did not give you 
credit for so much eloquence : you seem to have studied the 
Bible to some purpose, too. I didn’t think that so much 
Radicalism could be squeezed out of a few texts of Scripture. 
It’s quite a new light to me. I’ll just mark that card, and 
play it when I get a convenient opportunity. It may be a 
winning one in these democratic times.” 

And he did play it, as I heard hereafter ; but at present he 
seemed to think, that the less that was said further on clerical 
subjects the better, and commenced quizzing the people whom 
we passed, humorously and neatly enough ; while I walked 
on in silence, and thought of Mr. Bye-Ends, in the “ .Pil- 
grim’s Progress.” And yet I believe the man v'as really in 
earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far 
Jis he knew it ; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in 


214 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

the present state of society, what was right would pay him 
God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the corifusion 
of mingled selfishness and devotion that exists even in his own 
heart, much less in that of another ? 

The dean was not at home that day, having left town on 
business. George nodded familiarly to the footman who 
opened the door. 

“ You’ll mind and send me word the moment your master 
comes home — mind, now !” 

The fellow promised obedience, and we walked away. 

“You seem to be very intimate here,” said I, “with all 
parties T’ 

“ Oh ! footmen are useful animals — a half-sovereign now 
and then is not altogether thrown away upon them.^ But as 
for the higher powers, it is very easy to make one’s self at 
home in the dean’s study, but not so much so to get a footing 
in the drawing-room above. I suspect he keeps a precious 
sharp eye upon the fair Miss Lillian. ’ 

“ But,” I asked, as a jealous pang shot through my heart, 
“ how did you contrive to get this same footing at all 1 
When I met you at Cambridge, you seemed already well 
acquainted with these people.” 

“ How ? — how does a hound get a footing on a cold scent ? 
By working and casting about and about, and drawing on it 
inch by inch, as I drew on them for years, my boy ; and cold 
enough the scent was. You recollect that day at the Dul- 
wich Gallery ] I tried to see the arms on the carriage, but 
there were none ; so that cock wouldn’t fight.” 

“ The arms! I should never have thought of such a plan.” 

“ Dare say you wouldn’t. Then I harked back to the door- 
keeper, while you were St. Sebastianizing. He didn’t know 
their names, or didn’t choose to show me their ticket, on 
which it ought to have been ; so I went to one of the fellows 
whom I knew, and got him to find out. There comes out the 
value of money — for money makes acquaintances. Well, I 
found who they were. Then I saw no chance of getting at 
them. But for the rest of that year, at Trinity, I beat every 
bush in the University, to find some one who knew them ; 
and as fortune favors the brave, at last I hit off this Lord 
Lynedale ; and he, of course, was the ace of trumps — a fine 
catch in himself, and a double catch, because he was going to 
marry the cousin. So I made a dead set at him ; and tight 
work I had to nab him, I can fell you, for he w^as three or 
four years oldei* than I, and had traveled a good deal and 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


215 


?eeii life. But every man has his weak side ; and I found his 
was a sort of a High-Church Radicalism, and that suited me 
well enough, for I was always a deuce of a radical myself; 
so I stuck to him like a leech, and stood all his temper, and 
his pride, and those unpractical, windy visions of his, that 
made a common-sense fellow like me sick to listen to ; but I 
stood it, and here I am.” 

“ And what on earth induced you to stoop to all this — ” 
meanness I was on the point of saying. “ Surely you are in 
no want of money — your father could buy you a good living 
to-morrow.” 

“ And he will, hut not the one I want ; and he could not 
buy me reputation, power, rank, do you see, Alton, my gen- 
ius ? And what’s more he couldn’t buy me a certain little 
tit-bit, a jewel, worth a Jew’s-eye and a half, Alton, that 
I set my heart on from the first moment I set my eye 
on it.” 

My heart beat fast and fierce, but he ran on, 

“Do you think I’d have eaten all this dirt, if it hadn’t lain 
in my way to her 'I Eat dirt ! I’d drink blood, Alton — 
though I don’t often deal in strong words — if it lay in that 
road. I never set my heart on the thing yet, that I didn’t 
get it at last by fair means or foul — and I’ll get her ! I don’t 
care for her money, though that’s a pretty plumb. — Upon my 
life, I don’t. I worship her, limbs and eyes. — I worship the 
very ground she treads on. She’s a duck and a darling,” said 
he, smacking his lips like an Ogre over his prey, “ and I’ll 
have her before I’ve done, so help me — ” 

“ Whom do you mean?” I stammered out. 

“ Lillian ! you blind beetle !” 

I dropped his arm — “ Never, as I live !” 

He started back, and burst into a horse-laugh. 

“ Hullo ! my eye and Betty Martin ! You don’t mean to 
say that I have the honor of finding a rival in my talented 
cousin ?” 

I made no answer. 

“ Come, come, my dear fellow, this is too ridiculous. You 
and I are very good friends, and we may help each other, if we 
choose, like kith and kin in this here wale. So if you’re fool 
enough to quarrel with me, I warn you I’m not fool enough 
to return the compliment. Only” (lowering his voice), “just 
bear one little thing in mind — that I am, unfortunately, of a 
somewhat determined humor ; and if folks will get in my 
way, why it’s not my fault if I drive over them. You under- 


216 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


stand ] Well, if you intend to be sulky, I don’t. So good 
morning, till you fell yourself better/’ 

And he turned gayly down a side-street, and disappeared, 
looking taller, handsomer, raanfuller than ever. 

I returned home miserable ; 1 now saw in my cousin, not 
merely a rival, but a tyrant : and I began to hate him with 
that bitterness which fear alone can inspire. The eleven 
pounds still remained unpaid. Between three and four pounds 
was the utmost which I had been able to hoard up that 
autumn, by dint of scribbling and stinting; there was no 
chanc'e of profit from my book for months to come — if indeed 
it ever got published, which I hardly dared believe it would ; 
and I knew him too well to doubt that neither pity nor deli- 
cacy would restrain him from using his power over me, if I 
dared even to seem an obstacle in his way. 

I tried to write, but could not. I found it impossible to 
direct my thoughts, even to sit still ; a vague spectre of terror 
and degradation crushed me. Day after day I sat over the 
fire, and jumped up and went into the shop to find some- 
thing which I did not want, and peep listlessly into a dozen 
books, one after the other, and then wandered back again to 
the fireside, to sit mooning and moping, staring at that horri- 
ble incubus of debt — a devil which may give mad strength to 
the strong, but only paralyzes the weak. And I was weak, 
as every poet is more or less. There was in me, as I have 
somewhere read that there is in all poets that feminine vein 
— a receptive as well as a creative faculty — which kept up 
in me a continual thirst after beauty, rest, enjoyment. And 
here v’^as circumstance after circumstance goading me on- 
ward, as the gadfly did To, to continual wanderings, never 
ceasing exertions; every hour calling on me to do, while 1 
was only longing to be — to sit and observe, and fancy, and 
build freely at my own will. And then — as if this necessity 
of perpetual petty exertion was not in itself sufficient torment 
— to have that accursed debt — that knowledge that I was in 
a rival’s power, rising up like a black wall before me, to crip- 
ple, and render hopeless, for aught I knew, the very exertions 
to which it compelled me ! I hated the bustle — the crowds ; 
the ceaseless roar of the street outside maddened me. I long- 
ed in vain for peace — for one day’s freedom — to be one hour 
a shepherd-boy, and lie looking up at^he blue sky, Avithout 
a thought beyond the rushes I was plaiting! “Oh, that 1 
had wings as a dove ! — then would I flee away, and be at 
rest !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND I’OET. 


217 


And then, more than once, or twice either, the thought of 
suicide crossed me ; and I turned it over, and looked at it, and 
dallied with it, as a last chance in reserve. And then the 
tliought of Lillian came, and drove away the fiend. And 
then the thought of my cousin came, and paralyzed mo 
again ; for it told me that one hope was impossible. And 
then some fresh instance of misery or oppression forced itself 
upon me, and made me feel the awful sacredness of my call- 
ing, as a champion of the poor, and the base cowardice of 
deserting them for any selfish love of rest. And then I rec- 
ollected how I had betrayed my suftering brothers. How, 
for the sake cf vanity and patronage, I had consented to hide 
the truth about their rights — their wrongs. And so on, 
through weary weeks of moping melancholy — “ a double- 
minded man, unstable in all his ways !” 

At last, Mackaye, who, as I found afterward, had been 
watching all along my altered mood, contrived to worm my 
secret out of me. I had dreaded, that whole autumn, having 
to tell him the truth, because I knew that his first impulse 
M^ould be to pay the money instantly out of his own pocket ; and 
my pride, as well as my sense of justice, revolted at that, and 
sealed my lips. But now this fresh discovery — the knowledgo 
that it was not only in my cousin’s power to crush me, but 
also his interest to do so — had utterly unmanned me ; and, 
after a little innocent and fruilless prevarication, out came the 
truth, with tears of bitter shame. 

The old man pursed up his lips, and, without answering 
me, opened his table drawer, and commenced fumbling among 
accounts and papers. 

“ No ! no ! no ! best, noblest of friends ! 1 will not burden 
you with the fruits of my own vanity and extravagance. I 
will starve, go to jail, sooner than take your money. If you 
ofler it me, I will leave the house, bag and baggage, this 
moment.” And I rose to put my threat into execution. 

“ I havciia at present ony sic intention,” answered he, de- 
liberately ; seeing that there’s na necessity for paying debits 
twice ewer, when ye ha’ the stampt receipt for them.” And 
he put into rny hands, to my astonishment and rapture, a re- 
ceipt in full for the money, signed by my cousin 

Not daring to believo my own eyes, I turned it over and 
over, looked at it, looked at him — there w^as nothing but clear, 
smiling assurance in his beloved old face, as he twinkled, and 
winked, and chuckled, and pulled ofi’his spectacles, and wiped 
them, and put them on upsidcMlown ; and then relieved him- 

K 


218 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

self by rushing at his pipe, and cramming it fiercely vrith to 
bacco till he burst the bowl. 

Yes, it was no dream ! — the money was paid, and I was 
free ! The sudden relief was as intolerable as the long 
burden had been ; and, like a prisoner suddenly loosed from 
off the rack, my whole spirit seemed to collapse, and I sunk 
with my head upon the table, too faint even for gratitude. 

But who was my benefactor? Mackaye vouchsafed no 
answer, but that I “ suld ken better than he.” But when he 
found that I w'as really utterly at a loss to whom to attribute 
the mercy, he assured me, by way of comfort, that he was 
just as ignorant as myself; and at last, piecemeal, in his cir- 
cumlocutory and cautious Scotch method, informed me, that 
some six weeks back he had received an anonymous letter, 
“ a’thegither o’ a Belgravian cast o’ phizog,” containing a 
bank-note for twenty pounds, and setting forth the writer’s 
suspicions that I owed my cousin money, and their desire that 
Mr. Mackaye “o’ whose uprightness an’ generosity they were 
pleased to confess themselves no that ignorant,” should write 
to George, ascertain the sum, and pay it without my knowl- 
edge, handing over the balance, if any, to me, when he 
thought fit — “ Sae there’s the remnant — aucht pounds, sax 
shillings, an’ saxpence ; tippence being deduckit for expense 
o’ twa letters, anent the same transaction.” 

“ But what sort of hand-w'riting was it ?” asked I, almost 
disregarding the welcome coin. 

“ Ou, then — aiblins a man’s, aiblins a maid’s. He was na 
chirographosophic himsel’ — an’ he had na curiosity anent ony 
sic passages o’ aristocratic romance.” 

“But what was the post-mark of the letter ?” 

“ Why for suld I ha’ speired ? Gin the writers had been 
minded to be beknown, they’d ha’ sign’t their names upon 
the document. An’ gin they didna sae intend, wad it bo 
courteous o’ me to gang speiring an’ peering ower covers an’ 
seals ?” 

“ But where is the cover V 

“ Ou, then,” he went on, with the same provoking coolness, 
“white paper’s o’ geyan use, in various operations o’ the 
domestic economy. Sae I just tare it up — aiblins for pipc- 
Jights — I canna mind at this time.” 

“And why — ” asked I, more vexed and disappointed than 
I liked to confess — “ why did you not tell me belbrc ?” 

“ How would I ken that you had need o’t? An’ verily, 1 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


219 


thocht it no that bad a lesson for ye, to let the experiment a 
towrnond mair on the precious balms that break the head — 
wdiereby I opine the psalmist was minded to denote the 
delights o’ spending borrowed siller.” 

There was nothing more to be extracted from him ; so I 
was fain to set to work again (a pleasant compulsion truly) 
with a free heart, eight pounds in my pocket, and a brainful 
of conjectures. Was it the dean] Lord Lynedale ? or was 
it — could it be — Lillian herself? That thought was so deli- 
cious, that I made up my mind, as I had free choice among 
half-a-dozen equally improbable fancies, to determine that the 
most pleasant should be the true one ; and I hoarded the 
money, which I shrunk from spending as much as I should 
from selling her minature or a lock of her beloved golden hair. 
They were a gift from her — a pledge — the first Iruits ol^ — I 
dared not confess to myself what. 

Whereat the reader will smile, and say, not without reason, 
that I was fast fitting myself for Bedlam : if indeed, I had 
not proved my fitness for it already, by paying the tailors’ 
debts, instead of my own, with the ten pounds which Farmer 
Porter had given me. I am not sure that he would not be 
correct, but so I did, and so I suffered. 


CHAPTER XXV. 

A TRUE NOBLEMAN. 

At last my list of subscribers was completed, aud my poems 
actually in the press. Oh ! the childish joy with wliich I 
fondled my first set of proofs ! And how much finer the 
words looked in print than they ever, did in manuscript ! — 
One took in the idea of a whole page so charmingly at a 
glance, instead of having to feel one’s way throiigh line after 
line, and sentence after sentence. There was oniy one draw- 
back to my happiness — Mackaye did not seem to sympathize 
with it. He had never grumbled at what I considered, 
and still do consider, my cardinal ofiense, the omission of 
the strong political passages ; he seemed, on the contrary, 
in his inexplicable waywardness, to be rather pleased at it 
than otherwise. It was my publishing at all at which he 
growled. 

“ Ech,” he said, “ owre young to marry, is owre young to 
write ; but it’s the way o’ these puir distractit times. Nae 
chick can find a grain o’ corn, but oot he rins cackling wi' 
the shell on his head, to tell it to a’ the M^arld, as if there was 
never barley grown on the face o’ the earth before. I wonder 
whether Isaiah began to write before his beard was grown, 
or Dawvid cither ? He had mony a long year o’ shepherding 
an’ moss-trooping, an’ rugging an’ riving i’ the wildnerness, 
I’ll warrant, afore he got thae gran’ lyrics o’ his oot o’ him. 
Ye might tak’ example too, gin ye were minded, by Moses, 
the man o’ God, that was joost forty years at the learning o’ 
the Egyptians, afore he thocht gude to come forward into 
public life, an’ then fun’, to his gran’ surprise, I warrant, that 
he’d begun forty years too sune — an’ then had forty years 
mair, after that, o’ marching an’ law-giving, an’ bearing the 
burdens o’ the people, before he turned poet.” 

“ Poet, sir ! I never saw Moses in that light before.” 

“Then ye’ll just read the OOtli Psalm — ‘the prayer o’ 
Moses, the Man o’ God’ — the grandest piece o’ lyric, to my 
taste, that I ever heard o’ on the face o’ God’s earth, an’ see 
what a man can write that’ll have the patience to wait a 
century or twa before he rins to the publisher’s^ I gie ye up 
fra' this moment ; the letting out o’ ink is like Ae letting out 
o’ waters, or the eating o’ opium, or the getting up at public 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


221 


meetings. When a man begins he canna stop. There’s nae 
mail' enslaving lust o’ the flesh under the heaven than that 
same/«ror scribcndi, as the Latins hae it.” 

But at last my poems were printed, and bound, and act- 
ually published ; and I sat staring at a book of my own mak- 
ing, and wondering how it ever got into being ! And what 
was more, the book “ took,” and sold, and was reviewed in 
People’s journals, and in newspapers ; and Mackaye himself 
relaxed into a grin, when his oracle, the Spectator, the only 
honest paper, according to him, on the face of the earth, con- 
descended, after asserting its impartiality by two or three 
searching sarcasms, to dismiss me, grimly-benignant, with a 
paternal pat on the shoulder. Yes — I was a real live author 
at last, and signed myself, by special request, in the Mag- 

azine, as “ the author of Songs of the Highw'ays.” At last 
it struck me, and Mackayc too, who, however he hated flun- 
kydom, never overlooked an act of discourtesy, that it would 
be right for me to call upon the dean, and thank him formally 
for all the real kindness he had shown me. So I went to the 
handsome house ofl’ Harley-street, and was shown into his 
study, and saw my own book lying on the table; and was 
welcomed by the good old man, and congratulated on my suc- 
cess, and asked if I did not see my own wisdom in “ yielding 
to more experienced opinions than my own, and submitting to 
a censorship which, however severe it might have appeared 
at first, was, as the event proved, benignant both in its inten- 
tiorrs and eflects I” 

And then I was asked, even I, to breakfast there the next 
morning. And I went, and found no one there but some 
scientific gentlemen, to whom I was introduced as “ the young 
man whose poems we were talking of last night.” And 
Lillian sat at the head of the table, and poured out the cofiee 
and tea. And between ecstasy at seeing her, and the intense 
relief of not finding my dreaded and now hated cousin there, 
I sat in a delirium of silent joy, stealing glances at her beauty, 
and listening with all my ears to the conversation, which turn- 
ed upon the new-married couple. 

I heard endless praises, to which I could not but assent in 
silence, of Lord Ellerton’s perfections. His very personal ap- 
pearance had been enough to captivate my fancy ; and then 
they went on to talk of his magnificent philanthropic schemes, 
and his deep sense of the high duties of a landlord ; and how, 
finding himself, at his father’s death, the possessor of two vast 
but neglected estates, he had sold one in order to be able to 


222 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


do justice to the other, instead of laying house to house, and 
field to field, like most of his compeers. “ till he stood alone in 
the land, and there was no place left and how he had low- 
ered Ids rents, even though it had forced him to put down the 
ancestral pack of hounds, and live in a corner of the old castle ; 
and how he was draining, claying, breaking up old moorlands, 
and building churches, and endowing schools, and improving 
cottages ; and how he was expelling the old ignorant bankrupt 
race of farmers, and advertising every where for men of capi- 
tal, and science, and character, wdio would have courage to 
cultivate flax and silk, and try every species of experiment ; 
and how he had one scientific farmer after another, staying in 
his house as a friend ; and how he had numbers of his hooks 
re-bound in plain covers, that he might lend them to every 
one on his estate who wished to read them ; and how he had 
thrown open his picture-gallery, not only to the inhabitants of 
the neighboring town, but what (strange to say) seemed to 
strike the party as still more remarkable, to the laborers of his 
own village ; and how he was at that moment busy transform- 
ing an old unoccupied manor-house into a great associate-farm, 
in which all the laborers were to live under one roof, wdth a 
common kitchen and dining-hall, clerks and superintendents, 
whom they were to choose, subject only to his approval, and 
all of them, from the least to the greatest, have their own in 
terest in the farm, and be paid by per-centage on the profits ; 
and how he had one of the first political economists of the day 
staying with him, in order to work out for him tables of pro- 
portionate remuneration, applicable to such an agricultural 
establishment ; and how, too, he was giving the spade-labor 
system a fair trial, by laying out small cottage-farms, on rocky 
knolls and sides of glens, too steep to be cultivated by the 
plow; and was locating on them the most intelligent ar- 
tisans whom he could draft from the manufacturing town haut 

by 

And at that notion, my brain grew giddy with the hope of 
seeing myself one day in one of those same cottages, tilling 
the earth, under God’s sky, and perhaps — and then a whole 
cloud-world of love, freedom, fame, simple, graceful country 
luxury steamed up across my brain, to end — not, like the 
man’s in the “ Arabian Nights,” in my kicking over the tray 
of China, which formed the base-point of my inverted pyramid 
of hope — but in my finding the contents of my plate deposited 
in my lap, while I was gazing fixedly at Lillian. 

I must say for myself, though, that such accidents happened 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


223 


seldom ; whether it was hashfulness, or the tact which gener- 
ally, I believe, accompanies a weak and nervous body, and an 
active mind ; or whether it was that I possessed enough re- 
lationship to the monkey-tribe to make me a first-rate mimic, 
T used to get tolerably w'ell through on these occasions, by 
acting on the golden rule of never doing any thing which I 
had not seen some one else do first — a rule which never brought 
me into any greater scrape than swallowing something intol- 
erably hot, sour, and nasty (whereof I never discovered the 
name), because I had seen the dean do so a moment before. 

But one thing struck me through the whole of this conver- 
sation — the way in which the new-married Lady Ellerton 
was spoken of, as aiding, encouraging, originating — a help 
meet, if not an oracular guide, for her husband — in all these 
noble plans. She had already acquainted herself with every 
woman on the estate ; she was the dispenser, not merely of 
alms, for those seemed a disagreeable necessity, from which 
Lord Ellerton was anxious to escape as soon as possible, but 
of advice, comfort, and encouragement. She not only visited 
the sick, and taught in the schools — avocations which, thank 
God, I have reason to believe are matters of course, not only 
in the families of clergymen, but those of most squires and 
noblemen, when they reside on their estates — but seemed, 
from the hints which I gathered, to be utterly devoted, body 
and soul, to the w'elfare of the dwellers on her husband’s land. 

“ I had no notion,” I dared at last to remark, humbly 
enough, “ that Miss — Lady Ellerton cared so much for the 
people.” 

“ Really ! One feels inclined sometimes to wish that she 
cared for any thing beside them,” said Lillian, half to her 
father and half to me. 

This gave a fresh shake to my estimate of that remarkable 
woman’s character. But still, who could be prouder, more 
imperious, more abrupt in manner, harsh even to the very 
verge of good-breeding ? (for I had learnt what good-breeding 
was,' from the debating society as well as from the drawing- 
room) ; and, above all, had she not tried to keep me from 
Lillian ? But these cloudy thoughts melted rapidly away in 
that sunny atmosphere of success and happiness, and I went 
home as merry as a bird, and wrote all the morning more 
gracefully and sportively, as I fancied, than I had ever yet 
done. 

But my bliss did not end here. In a week or so, behold 
one morning a note — written, indeed, by the dean — but di- 


294 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


reeled in Lillian’s own hand, inviting me to come there to tea, 
that I might see a few of the* literary characters of.the day. 

I covered the envelope with kisses, and thrust it next my 
fluttering heart. I then proudly showed the note to Mackaye. 
He looked pleased, yet pensive, and then broke out with a 
fresh adaptation of his favorite song, 

“ and shovel hats and a’ that— 

A man’s a man for a’ that.” 

” The auld gentleman is a man and a gentleman ; an’ has 
made a verra courteous, an’ well considerit move, gin ye ha’ 
the sense to profit by it, an’ no’ turn it to yer ain destruction.” 

“ Destruction V 

“ Ay — that’s the w’ord, an’ nothing less, laddie !” 

And he went into the outer shop, and returned with a vol- 
ume of Bulwer’s “ Ernest Maltravers.” 

“ What ! are you a novel reader, Mr. Mackaye ?” 

*‘How do ye ken what I may ha’ thocht gude to read in 
my time? Ye’ll be pleased the noo to sit down an’ begin at 
that page — an’ read, mark, learn, an’ inwardly digest, the 
history of Castruccio Cesarini — an’ the gude God gie ye grace 
to lay the same to heart.” 

I read that fearful story ; and my heart sunk, and my eyes 
were full of tears, long ere I had finished it. Suddenly I 
looked up at Mackaye, half angry at the pointed allusion to 
my own case. 

The old man was watching me intently, with folded hands, 
and a smile of solemn interest and affection worthy of Socrates 
himself. He turned his head as I looked up, but his lips 
kept moving. I fancied, I know not why, that he was pray- 
ing for me. 


CHAPTER XXVI. 


'I HE TRIUMPHANT AUTHOR, 

So to the party I went, and had the delight of seeing and 
hearing tlie men with whose names I had been long ac- 
quainted, as the leaders of scientific discovery in this won- 
drous age ; and more than one poet, too, over whose works I 
had gloated, whom I had worshiped in secret. Intense was 
the pleasure of now realizing to myself, as living men, wear- 
ing the same flesh and blood as myself, the names which had 
been to me mythic ideas. Lillian was there among them, 
more exquisite than ever ; but even she at first attracted my 
eyes and thoughts less than did the truly great men around 
her. I hung on every word they spoke, I watched every 
gesture, as if they must have some deep significance ; the 
very way in which they drank their coffee was a matter of 
interest to me. I was almost disappointed to see them eat 
and chat like common men. I expected that pearls and 
diamonds would drop from their lips, as they did from those 
of the girl in the fairy-tale, every time they opened their 
mouths ; and certainly the conversation that evening was a 
new world to me — though I could only, of course, be a list- 
ener. Indeed, 1 wished to be nothing more. I felt that 1 
was taking my place there among the holy guild of authors — 
that I too, however humbly, had a thing to say, and had said 
it ; and I was content to sit on the lowest step of the literary 
temple, without envy for those elder and more practiced 
priests of wisdom, who had earned by long labor the freedom 
of the inner shrine. I should have been quite happy enough 
standing there, looking and listening — ^but I was at last forced 
to come forward. Lillian was busy chatting with grave, 
gray-headed men, who seemed as ready tlo flirt, and pet and 
admire the lovely little fairy, as if they had been as young 
and gay as herself. It was enough for me to see her appre- 
ciated and admired. I loved them for smiling on her, for 
handing her from her seat to the piano with reverent courtesy : 
gladly would I have taken their place : I was content, how- 
ever, to be only a spectator ; for it was not my rank, but rny 
youth, I was glad to fancy, which denied me that blissful 
honor. But as she sang, I could not help stealing up to the 
piano ; and, feasting my greedy eyes with every motion ol 

TC ^ 


226 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

those delicious lips, listen and listen, entranced, and living 
only in that melody. 

Suddenly, after singing two or three songs, she began finger- 
ing the keys, and struck into an old air, wild and plaintive, 
rising and falling like the swell of an iEolian harp upon a 
distant breeze. 

“ Ah ! now,” she said, “ if I could get words for that ! 
What an exquisite lament somebody might write to it, if 
they could only thoroughly take in the feeling and meaning' 
of it.” 

“ Perhaps,” I said, humbly, “ that is the only way to write 
songs — to let some air get possession of one’s whole soul, and 
gradually inspire the words for itself; as the old Hebrew pro- 
phets had music played before them.” 

She looked up, just as if she had been unconscious of my 
presence till that moment. 

“Ah ! Mr. Locke! — well, if you understand my meaning 
so thoroughly, perhaps you will try and write some words for 
me.” 

“I am afraid that I do not enter sufficiently into the mean- 
ing of the air.” 

“ Oh ! then, listen while I play it over again. I am sure 
you ought to appreciate any thing so sad and tender.” 

And she did play it, to my delight, over again, even more 
gracefully an(J carefully than before — making the inarticulate 
sounds speak a mysterious train of thoughts and emotions. It 
is strange how little real intellect, in women especially, is re- 
quired for an exquisite appreciation of the beauties of music 
— perhaps, because it appeals to the heart and not the head. 

She rose and left the piano, saying archly, “ Now, don’t 
forget your promise ;” and I, poor fool, my sunlight suddenly 
withdrawn, began torturing my brains on the instant to think 
of a subject. 

As it happened, my attention was caught by hearing two 
gentlemen close to me discuss a beautiful sketch by Copley 
Fielding, if I recollect rightly, which hung on the wall — a 
wild waste of tidal sands, with here and there a line of stake- 
nets fluttering in the wind — a gray shroud of rain sweeping 
up from the westward, through which low red clifls glowed 
dimly in the rays of the setting sun — a train of horses and 
cattle splashing slowly through shallow desolate pools and 
creeks, their wet, red, and black.Jiides glittering in one long 
line of level light. 

They seemed thoroughly conversant with art J and as I 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


227 


fistened to their criticisms, I learnt more in five minutes, 
about the characteristics of a really true and good picture, 
and about the perfection to Avhich our unrivaled JEnglish 
landscape-painters have attained, than I ever did from all the 
books and criticisms which I had read. One of them had 
seen the spot represented, at the mouth of the Dee, and began 
telling Avild stories of salmon-fishing, and wild-fowl shooting 
— and then a tale of a girl, who in bringing her father’s cattle 
home across the sands, had been caught by a sudden flow of 
the tide, and found next day a corpse hanging among the 
stake-nets far below. The tragedy, the art of the picture, the 
simple, dreary grandeur of the scenery, took possession of me ; 
and I stood gazing a long time, and fancying myself pacing 
the sands, and wondering whether there were shells upon it 
— I had often longed for once only in my life to pick up shells 
— when Lady Ellerton, whom I had not before noticed, woke 
me from my reverie. 

I took the liberty of asking after Lord Ellerton. 

“ He is not in town — he has staid behind for one day to 
attend a great meeting of his tenantry — you will see the ac 
count in the papers to-morrow morning — he comes to-mor 
row.” And as she spoke, her whole face and figure seemed 
to glow and heave, in spite of herself, with pride and affec 
tion. 

“ And now, come with me, Mr. Locke — the embas- 

sador wishes to speak to you.” 

“ The embassador !” I said, startled ; for let us be as 

democratic as we will, there is something in the name of great 
officers which awes, perhaps rightly, for the moment, and it 
requires a strong act of self-possession to recollect that “ a man’s 
a man for a’ that.” Besides, I knew enough of the great man 
in question to stand in awe of him for his own sake, having 
lately read a panegyric of him, which perfectly astounded me, 
by its description of his piety and virtue, his family afiection, 
and patriarchal simplicity, the liberality and |)hilanthropy of 
all his measures, and the enormous intellectual powers, and 
stores of learning, which enabled him, with the affairs of 
Europe on his shoulders, to write deeply and originally on the 
most abstruse questions of theology, history, and science. . 

Lady Ellerton seemed to guess my thoughts. “ You need * 
not be afraid of meeting an aristocrat, in the vulgar sense of 
the word. You will see one^ho, once perhaps as unknown 
as yourself, has risen by virtue and wisdom to guide the des- 
tinies of nations — and shall I tell you how? Not by fawning 


228 


ALTON LOCXE, TAILOR AND POET. 


and yielding to the fancies of the great ; not by compromising 
his own convictions to suit their prejudices — ” 

I felt the rebuke, but she went on— 

“He owes his greatness to having dared, one evening, to 
contradict a crown-prince to his face, and fairly conquer him 
in argument, and thereby bind the truly royal heart to him 
forever.” 

“ There are few scions of royalty to whose favor that would 
be a likely path.” 

“ True ; and therefore the greater honor is due to the young 
student who could contradict, and the prince who could bo 
contradicted.” 

By this time we had arrived in the great man’s presence ; 
he was sitting with a little circle round him, in the further 
drawing-room, and certainly I never saw a nobler specimen 
of humanity. I felt myself at once before a hero — not of war 
and bloodshed, but of peace and civilization; his portly and 
ample figure, fair hair and delicate complexion, and, above 
all, the benignant calm of his countenance, told of a character 
gentle and genial — at peace with himself and all the world ; 
while the exquisite proportion of his chiseled and classic feat- 
ures, the lofty and ample brain, and the keen, thoughtful 
eye, bespoke, at the first glance, refinement and wisdom — 

The reason firm, the temperate will — 

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill. 

I am not ashamed to say. Chartist as I am, that I felt in- 
clined to fall upon my knees, and own a master of God’s own 
making. 

He received my beautiful guide with a look of chivalrous 
afiection, which I observed that she returned with interest ; 
and then spoke in a voice peculiarly bland and melodious. 

“ So, my dear lady, this is the iiroUge of whom you have 
so often spoken ?” 

So she had often spoken of me ! Blind fool that I was, I 
only took it in as food for my own self-conceit, that my enemy 
(for so I actually fancied her) could not help praising me. 

“ I have read your little book, sir,” he said in the same 
soft, benignant voice, “ with very great pleasure. It is an- 
other proof, if I required any, of the undercurrent of living and 
healthful thought which exists even in the less-known ranks 
of your great nation. I shall send it to some young friends 
of mine in Germany, to show them that Englishmen can feel 
acutely and speak boldly on the social evils of their country, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


229 


without indulging in that frantic and bitter revolutionary 
spirit, which warps so many young minds among us. You 
understand the German language at all ?” 

I had not that honor. 

“Well, you must learn it. We have much to teach you 
in the sphere of abstract thought, as you have much to teach 
us in those of the practical reason and the knowledge of man 
kind. I should be glad to see you some day in a German 
university. I am anxious to encourage a truly spiritual fra- 
ternization between the two great branches of the Teutonic 
stock, by welcoming all brave young English spirits to their 
ancient fatherland. Perhaps hereafter your kind friends here 
will be able to lend you to me. The means are easy, thank 
God ! You will find in the Germans true brothers, in ways 
even more practical than sympathy and affection.” 

I could not but thank the great man, with many blushes, 
and went home that night utterly montee,^' as I believe 
the French phrase is — beside myself with gratified vanity and 
love ; to lie sleepless under a severe fit of asthma — sent per- 
haps as a wholesome chastisement, to cool my excited spirits 
down to something like a rational pitch. As I lay castle-build- 
ing, Lillian’s wild air rang still in my ears, and combined 
itself somehow with that picture of the Cheshire Sands, and 
the story of the drowned girl, till it shaped itself into a song, 
which as it is yet unpublished, and as I have hitherto obtruded 
little or nothing of my own composition on my readers, I may 
be excused for inserting here. 

I. 

“ 0 Mary, go and call the cattle home, 

And call the cattle home, 

And call the cattle home. 

Across the sands o’ Dee;” 

The western wind was wild and dank wi’ foam. 

And all alone went she. 

II. 

The creeping tide came up along the sand, 

And o’er and o’er the sand. 

And round and round the sand. 

As far as eye could sec ; 

The blinding mist came down and hid the land — •' 

And never home came she. 

III. 

j “ Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair— 

f A tress o’ golden hair, 

’ O’ drowned maiden’s hair, 


230 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

Above the nets at sea ? 

Wa.s never salmon yet that shone so fair, 

Among tlie stakes on Dee.” 

IV. 

They rowed her in across the rolling foam, 

The cruel crawling foam. 

The cruel hungry foam 
To her grave beside the sea: 

But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home 
Across the sands o’ Dee. 

There — let it go ! — it was meant as an offering for one 
whom it never reached. 

About mid-day I took my way toward the dean’s house, to 
thank him for his hospitality — and, I need not say, to present 
my offering at my idol’s shrine ; and as I went I conned over 
a dozen complimentary speeches about Lord Ellerton’s wisdom 
liberality, eloquence — but behold ! the shutters of the house 
were closed. What could be the matter? It was full ten 
minutes before the door was opened ; and then, at last, an 
old woman, her eyes red with weeping, made her appearance. 
My thoughts flew instantly to Lillian — something must have 
befallen her. I gasped out her name first, and then recollect- 
ing myself, asked for the dean. 

“ They had all left town that morning.” 

“ Miss — Miss Winnstay — is she ill ?” 

“No.” 

“ Thank God !” I breathed freely again. What matter 
what happened to all the world beside ? 

“ Ay, thank God, indeed ; but poor Lord Ellerton was 
thrown from his horse last night and brought home dead. A 
messenger came here by six this morning, and they’re all gone 

off to . Her ladyship’s raving mad. And no wonder.” 

And she burst out crying afresh, and shut the door in my 
face. 

Lord Ellerton dead ! and Lillian gone too ! Something 
whispered that I should have cause to remember that day. 
My heart sank within me. When should I see her again ? 

That day was the 1st of June, 1845. On the 10th of 
April, 1848, I saw Lillian Winnstay again. Dare I write 
my history between those two points of time ? Yes, even 
that must be done, for the s ike of the rich who read, and the 
poor who suffer. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE PLUSH BREECHES TRAGEDY.. 

^ My triumph had received a cruel check enough, when just 
at its height, and more were appointed to follow. Behold! 
some two days after, another — all the more bitter, because 
my conscience whispered that it was not altogether undeserv- 
ed. The people’s press had been hitherto praising and pet- 
ting me lovingly enough. I had been classed (and Heaven 
knows that the comparison was dearer to me than all the 
applause of the wealthy) with the Corn-Law Rhymer, and 
the author of the “Purgatory of Suicides.” My class had 
claimed my talents as their own — another “ voice fresh from 
the heart of Nature,” another “ untutored songster of the wil- 
derness,” another “prophet arisen among the suffering mill- 
ions,” — when, one day, behold in Mr. O’Flynn’s paper a long 
and fierce attack on me, my poems, my early history ! How 
he could have got at some of the facts there mentioned, how 
he could have dared to inform his readers that I had broken 
my mother’s heart by misconduct, I can not conceive ; unlesi 
my worthy brother-in- law', the Baptist preacher, had beer 
kind enough to furnish him with the materials. But how- 
ever that may be, he showed me no mercy. I was suddenlj 
discovered to be a time-server, a spy, a concealed aristocrat. 
Such paltry talent as I had, I had prostituted for the sake of 
fame. I had deserted The People’s Cause for filthy lucre — 
an allurement which Mr. O’Flynn had always treated witb^ 
withering scorn — in Nay more, I would write, and 

notoriously did write, in any paper. Whig, Tory, or Radical, 
where I could earn a shilling by an enormous gooseberry, or 
a scrap of private slander. And the working-men were 
solemnly warned to beware of me and my writings, till the 
editor had further investigated certain ugly facts in my history, 
which he would in due time report to his patriotic and enlight- 
ened readers. 

All this stung me in the most sensitive nerve of my whole 
Heart, for I knew that I could not altogether exculpate my- 
self; and to that miserable certainty was added the dread ol 
some fresh exposure. Had he actually heard of the omissions 
in my poems ? — and if he once touched on that subject, what 
could I answer ? Oh ! how bitterly now I felt the force of the 


232 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


critic’s careless lash ! — the awful responsibility of those writ- 
ten words, which we bandy about so thoughtlessly ! How 1 
recollected now, with shame and remorse, all the hasty and 
cruel utterances to which T, too, had given vent against those 
who had dared to differ from me ; the harsh, one-sided judg- 
ments, the reckless imputations of motive, the bitter sneers, 
“ rejoicing in evil rather than in the truth.” How I, too, 
had longed to prove my victims in the wrong, and turned 
away, not only lazily, but angrily, from many an exculpatory 
fact ! And here was my Nemesis come at last. As I had 
done unto others, so it was done unto me ! 

It was right that it should be so. However indignant, 
mad, almost murderous, I felt at the time, I thank God for it 
noM^ It is good to be punished in kind. It is good to be 
made to feel what we have made others feel. It is good — 
any thing is good, however bitter, which shows us that there 
is such a law as retribution ; that we are not the sport of blind 
chance or a triumphant fiend, but that there is a God who 
judges the earth — righteous to repay every man according to 
his works. 

But at the moment I had no such ray of comfort — and, 
full of rage and shame, I dashed the paper down before Mac 
kaye. “ How shall I answer him? What shall I say ?” 

The old man read it all through with a grim saturnine 
smile. 

“ Hoolie, hoolie, speech is o’ silver — silence is o’ gold, says 
Thomas Carlyle, anent this an’ ither matters. Wha ’d be 
fashed wi’ sic blethers ? Ye’ll just abide patient, and baud 
still in the Lord, until this tyranny be owerpast. ' Commit 
your cause to Him, said the auld Psalmist, an’ he’ll mak’ 
your righteousness as clear as the light, an’ your just dealing 
as the noonday.” 

“But I must explain; I owe it as a duty to myself; I 
must refute these charges ; I must justify myself to our 
friends.” 

“ Can ye do that same, laddie ?” asked he, with one of his 
quaint, searching looks. Somehow, I blushed, and could not 
altogether meet his eye, while he went on, “ — An’ gin ye 
could, whaur would ye do ’t ? I ken na periodical whar the 
editor will gie ye a clear stage an’ no favor, to bang him 
ower the lugs.” 

“ Then I will try some other paper.” 

“ An’ what lor then ? They that read him, winna read 
the ither ; an’ they that read the ither, winna read him. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


233 


He has his ain set o’ dupes, like every ither editor ; an’ ye 
mun let him gang his gate, an’ feed his ain kye with his ain 
hay. He’ll no’ change it for your bidding.” 

“ What an abominable thing this whole business of the 
press is, then, if each editor is to be allowed to humbug his 
readers at his pleasure, without a possibility of exposing or 
contradicting him !” 

“An’ ye’ve just spoken the truth, laddie. There’s na mair 
accursed inquisition, than this of thae selfelected popes, the 
editors. That puir auld Roman ane, ye can bring him forat 
whan ye list, bad as he is. ‘ FoBnum habet in cornu ;’ his 
name’s ower his shop-door. But these anonymies — priests o’ 
the order o’ Melchisedec by the deevil’s side, without father 
or mither, beginning o’ years nor end o’ days — without a 
local habitation or a name — as kittle to baud as a brock in a 
cairn — ” 

“ What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye ?” asked I, for he was 
getting altogether unintelligibly Scotch, as was his custom 
when excited. 

“ Ou, I forgot ; ye’re a puir Southern body, an’ no’ sensible to 
the gran’ metaphoric powers o’ the true Dawric. But it’s an 
accursit state a’thegither, the noo, this o’ the anonymous press 
— oreeginally devised, ye ken, by Balaam the son o’ Beor, for 
serving God wi’out the deevil’s finding it out — an’ noo, after 
the way o’ human institutions, translated ower to help folks 
to serve the deevil without God’s finding it out. I’m no’ 
astonished at the puir expiring religious press for siccan a fa’ ; 
but for the working-men to be a’ as bad — it’s grewsome to 
behold. I’ll tell ye what, my bairn, there’s na salvation for 
the workmen, while they defile themselves this fashion, wi’ 
a’ the very idols o’ their ain tyrants — wi’ salvation by act 
o’ parliament — irresponsible rights o' property — anonymous 
Balaamry — fechtin’ that canny auld farrant fiend, Mammon, 
wi’ his ain weapons — and then a’ fleyed, because they get 
well beaten for their pains. I’m sair forfaughten this mony a 
year wi’ watching the puir gowks, trying to do God’s wark 
wi’ the decvil’s tools. Tak’ tent o’ that.” 

And I did “ tak’ tent o’ it.” Still there would have been 
as little present consolation as usual in Mackaye’s unwelcome 
truths, even if the matter had stopped there. But, alas ! it 
did not stop there. O’Flynn seemed determined to “ run a 
muck” at me. Every week some fresh attack appeared. 
The very passages about the universities and church property, 
which had caused our quarrel, were paraded against me, with 


234 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


free additions and comments; and, at last, to my horror, out 
came the very story which 1 had all along dreaded, about the 
expurgation of my poems, with the coarsest allusions to pet- 
ticoat influence — aristocratic kisses — and the Duchess of 
Devonshire canvassing draymen for Fox, &c., &c. How he 
got a clew to the scandal I can not conceive. Mackaye and 
Crossthwaite, I had thought, w^ere the only souls to whom I 
had ever breathed the secret, and they denied indignantly the 
having ever betrayed my weakness. How it came out, I say 
again, I can not conceive ; except because it is a great ever- 
lasting law, and sure to fulfill itself, sooner or later, as we 
may see by the histories of every remarkable, and many an 
unremarkable man, “ There is nothing secret, but it shall be 
made manifest ; and whatsoever ye have spoken in the closet, 
shall be proclaimed upon the house-tops.” 

For some time after that last exposure, I was thoroughly 
crest-fallen — and not without reason. I had been giving a 
few lectures among the working-men, on various literary and 
social subjects. I found my audience decrease — and those 
who remained seemed more inclined to hiss than to applaud 
me. In vain I ranted and quoted poetry, often more violently 
than my own opinions justi.hed. My words touched no re- 
sponsive chord in my hearers’ hearts ; they had lost faith in 
me. 

At last, in the middle of a lecture on Shelley, I was in- 
dulging, and honestly too, in some very glowing and passion- 
ate praise of the true nobleness of a man, whom neither birth 
nor education could blind to the evils of society ; who, for the 
sake of the suffering many could trample under foot his hered- 
itary pride, and become an outcast for The People’s Cause. 

I heard a whisper close to me, from one w'hose opinion I 
valued, and value still. — a scholar and a poet, one wdio had 
tasted poverty, and slander, and a prison, for The Good Cause : 

“ Fine talk ; but it’s ‘ all in his day’s work.’ Will he dare 
to say that to-morrow to the ladies at the West-end ?” 

No — I should not. I knew it ; and at that instant I felt 
myself a liar, and stopped short — my tongue clove to the roof 
of my mouth. I fumbled at my papers — clutched the water 
tumbler — tried to go on — stopped short again — caught up my 
hat, and rushed from the room, amid peals of astonished 
laughter. 

It was some months after this that, fancying the storm 
blown over, I summoned up courage enough to attend a 
political meeting of our party; but evenThere my Nemesis 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


235 


met me full face. After some sanguinary speech, I really 
forget from whom, and if I recollected, God forbid that I 
should tell now, I dared to controvert, mildly enough. Heaven 
knows, some especially frantic assertion or other. But before 
1 could get out three sentences, O’Flynn flew at me with a 
coarse invective hounded on, by-the-by, by one who, calling 
himself a gentleman might have been expected to know bet- 
ter. But, indeed, he and O’Flynn had the same object in 
view, which was simply to sell their paper ; and as a means 
to that great end, to pander to the fiercest passions of their 
readers, to bully and silence all moderate and rational Chart- 
ists, and pet and tar on the physical-force men, till the poor 
fellows began to take them at their word. Then, when it 
came to deeds and not to talk, and people got frightened, and 
the sale of the paper decreased a little, a blessg^change came 
over them — and they awoke one morning meel^Cr than lambs * 
“ ulterior measures” had vanished back into the barbarous 
ages, pikes, vitriol-bottles, and all; and the public were enter- 
tained with nothing but homilies on patience and resignation, 
the “triumphs of moral justice,” the “omnipotence of public 
opinion,” and the “gentle conquests of fraternal love” — til; 
it was safe to talk treason and slaughter again. 

But just then treason happened to be at a premium. Sedi 
tion, which had been floundering on in a confused, disconso 
late, under-ground way ever since 1842, was supposed by the 
public to be dead ; and for that very reason it was safe to 
talk it, or, at least, back up those who chose to do so. And 
so I got no quarter — though really, if the truth must be told, 
I had said nothing unreasonable. 

Horne I went disgusted, to toil on at my hack- writing, only 
praying that I might be let alone to scribble in peace, and 
often thinking, sadly, how little my friends in Harley-street 
could guess at the painful experience, the doubts, the strug- 
gles, the bitter cares, which went to the making of the poetry 
which they admired so much ! 

I was not, however, left alone to scribble in peace, either 
by O’ Flynn or by his readers, who formed, alas ! just then, only 
too large a portion of the thinking artisans ; every day brought 
some fresh slight or annoyance with it, till I received one 
afternoon, by the Parcels Delivery Company, a large unpaid 
packet containing, to my infinite disgust, an old pair of yellow 
plush breeches, v/ith a recommeaidation to wear them, whoso 
meaning could not be mistaken. 

Furious, T thrust the unoflcndiag garment into the fire, and 


236 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND 1 OEl. 


held it there with the tongs, regardless of the horrible smell 
which accompanied its martyrdom, till the lady-lodger on the 
first floor rushed down to inquire whether the house was on fire. 

I answered her by hurling a book at her head, and brought 
down a volley of abuse, under which I sat in sulky patience, 
till Mackaye and Crossthwaite came in and found her railing 
in the doorway, and me sitting over the fire, still intent on 
the frizzling remains of the breeches. 

“ Was this insult of your invention Mr. Crossthwaite ?” 
asked I, in a tone of lofty indignation, holding up the last 
scrap of unroasted plush. 

Pwoars of laughter from both of them made me only more 
frantic, and 1 broke out so incoherently, that it was some time 
before the pair could make out the cause of my fury. 

“ Upon my honor, Locke,” quoth John, at last, holding his 
sides, “ I never, sent them ; though, on the whole — you’ve 
made my stomach ache so with laughing, I can’t speak. But 
you must expect a joke or two, after your late fashionable 
connections.” 

I stood, still and white with rage. 

“ Really, my good fellow, how can you wonder if our friends 
.suspect you 1 Can you deny that you’ve been ofl’ and on late 
ly between flunkydom and The Cause, like a donkey between 
two bottles of hay ? Have you not neglected our meetings ? 
Have you not picked all the spice out of your poems ? And 
can you expect to eat your cake and keep it too ? You must 
be one thing or the other ; and, though Sandy, here, is too 
kind-hearted to tell you, you have disappointed us both miser- 
ably — and there’s the long and short of it.” 

I hid my face in my hands, and sat moodily over the fire ; 
my conscience told me that I had nothing to answer. 

“ Whisht, Johnnie ! Ye’re ower sair on the lad. He’s a’ 
right at heart stilf an’ he’ll do good service. But the deevil 
a’ ways fechts hardest wi’ them he’s maist Teard of What’s 
this anent agricultural distress ye had to tell me the noo ?” 

“ There is a rising down in the country, a friend of mine 
writes me. The people are starving, not beiause bread is 
dear, but because it’s cheap; and, like sensible men, they’re 
going to have a great meeting, to inquire the rights and wrong 
of all that. Now, I want to send a deputation down, to see 
how far they are inclined to go, and let them know we up in 
London are with them. And then we might get up a cor- 
responding association, you know. It’s a great opening for 
spreading the principles of the Charter.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 237 

“I sail’ misdoubt, it’s just bread they’ll be wanting, thae 
laborers, mair than liberty. Their God is their belly, I’m 
thinking, and a verra poor, empty idol he is the noo ; sma’ 
burnt-otlerings, and fat o’ rams he gets, to propitiate him. 
But ye might send down a canny body, just to spy out the 
nakedness o’ the land.” 

“ I will go !” I said, starting up. “ They shall see that I 
do care for The Cause. If it’s a dangerous mission, so much 
the better ; it will prove my sincerity. Where is the place?” 

“ About ten-miles from D .” 

“ -D 1” My heart sank — if it had been any other spot 

in England ! But it was too late - to retract. Sandy saw 
what was the matter, and tried to turn the subject ; but I 
was peremptory, almost rude with him. I felt I must keep 
up my present excitement, or lose my heart, and my caste, 
for ever ; and as the hour for the committee was at hand, I 
jumped up and set off thither with them, whether they would 
or not. I heard Sandy whisper to Crossthwaite, and turned 
quite fiercely on him. 

“ If you want to speak about me, speak out. If you fancy 
that I shall let my connection with that place” (I could not 
bring myself to name it) “stand in the way of my duty, you 
do not know me.” 

I announced my intention at the meeting. It was at first 
received coldly ; but I spoke energetically — perhaps, as some 
told me afterward, actually eloquently. When I got heated, 

I alluded to my former stay at D , and said (while my 

heart sank at the bravado which I was uttering) that I should 
consider it a glory to retrieve my character with them, and 
devote myself to the cause of the oppressed, in the very local- 
ity whence had first arisen their unjust but pardonable sus- 
picions. In short, generous, trusting hearts as they were, 
and always are, I talked them round ; they shook me by the 
hand one by one, bade me God-speed, told 'me that I stood 
higher than ever in their eyes, and then set to work to vote 
money from their funds for my traveling expenses, which I 
magnanimously refused, saying that I had a pound or two 
left from the sale of my poems, and that I must be allowed, 
as an act of repentance and restitution, to devote it to The 
Cause. 

My triumph was complete. Even O’Flynn, who, like all 
Irishmen, had plenty of loose good-nature at bottom, and was 
as sudden and furious in his loves as in his hostilities, scram-\ 
bled over the benches, regardless of patriots’ toes, to shake 


238 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


me violently by the hand, and inlorm me that I was “ a broth 
of a boy,” and that “ any little disagreements between us had 
v’^anished like a passing cloud from the sunshine of our frater- 
nity” — when my eye was caught by a face which there was 
no mistaking — my cousin’s ! 

Yes, there he sat, watching me like a basilisk, with his 
dark, glittering, mesmeric eyes, out of a remote corner of the 
room — not in contempt or anger, but there was a quiet, assur 
ed, sardonic smile about his lips, which chilled me to the heart 

The meeting was sufficiently public to allow of his presence 
but how had. he found out its existence ? Had he come ther 
as a spy on me 1 Had he been in the room when my visi 

to D was determined on 1 I trembled at the thought , 

and 1 trembled, too, lest he should be daring enough — and I 
knew he could dare any thing — to claim acquaintance with 
me there and then. It would have ruined my new restored 
reputation forever. But he sat sti!l and steady : and I had 
to go through the rest of the evening’s business under the 
miserable, cramping knowledge that every word and gesture 
was being noted down by my most deadly enemy ; trembling 
whenever I was addressed, lest some chance word ol an 
acquaintance should implicate me still further — though, 
indeed, I was deep enough already. The meeting seemed 
interminable ; and there I fidgeted, with my face scailet — 
always seeing those basilisk eyes upon me — in fancy, lor I 
dared not look again toward the corner where I knew they 
were. 

At last it was over — the audience went out; and when I 
had courage to look round, my cousin had vanished among 
them. A load was taken off my breast, and I breathed freely 
again — for five minutes ; for I had not made ten steps u|) the 
street, when an arm was familiarly thrust through mine, and 
I found myself in the clutches of my evil genius. 

“ How are you, my dear fellow ? Expected to meet you 
there. Why, what an orator you are I Really, I haven’t 
heard more fluent or passionate English this month of Sun- 
days. You must give me a lesson in sermon-preaching. I 
can tell you, we parsons want a hint or two in that line. So 

you’re going down to D , to see after those poor starving 

laborers ? Ton my honor, I ve a great mind to go with you.” 

So, then, he knew all ! However, there was nothing for it 
but to brazen it out ; and, besides, I was in his power, and 
however hateful to me his seeming cordiality might be, I dared 
not offend him at that rnomei.t , 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


239 . 


“ It would be well if you did. If you parsons would show 
yourselves at such places as these a little oftener, you w'ould 
do more to make the people believe your mission real, than by 
all the tracts and sermons in the world.” 

“ But, my dear cousin” (and he began to snuffle and sink 
his voice), “ there is so much sanguinary language, so much 
unsanctified impatience ; you frighten away all the meek 
apostolic men among the priesthood — the very ones who feel 
most for the lost sheep of the flock.” 

“ Then the parsons are either great Pharisees or great 
cowards, or both.” 

“ Very likely. I was in a precious fright myself, I know, 
when I saw you recognized me. If I had not felt strength- 
. ened, you know, as of course one ought to be in all trials, by 
the sense of my holy calling, I think I should have bolted 
at once. However, I took the precaution of bringing my 
Bowie and revolver with me, in case the worst came to the 
M^orst.” 

“ And a very needless precaution it was,” said I, half 
laughing at the quaint incongruity of the priestly and the lay 
elements in his speech. “ You don’t seem to know much 
of working-men’s meetings, or working-men’s morals. Why, 
that place was open to all the world. The proceedings will 
be in the newspaper to-morrow. The whole bench of bishops 
might have been there, if they had chosen ; and a great deal 
of good it would have done them !” 

“ I fully agree with you, my dear fellow. No one hates 
the bishops more than we true high-churchmen, I can tell 
you — that’s a great point of sympathy between us and the 
people. But I must be off. By-the-by, would you like me 

to tell our friends at D , that I met you ? They often 

ask after you in their letters, I assure you.” 

This was a sting of complicated bitterness. I felt all that 
it meant at once. So he was in constant correspondence with 
them, while I — and that thought actually drove out of my 
head the more pressing danger of his utterly ruining me in 
tlieir esteem, by telling them, as he had a very good right to 
do, that I was going to preach Chartism to discontented mobs. 

“ Ah ! well ! perhaps you wouldn’t wish it mentioned ? 
As you like, you know. Or, rather,” and he laid an iron 
grasp on my arm, and dropped his voice — this time in earnest 
■ — as you behave, my wise and loyal cousin ! Good night.” 

I went home — the excitement of self-applause, which the 
laeeting had called up, damped by a strange weight of fore- 


240 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


boding. And yet I could not help laughing, when, just as 1 
v/as turning into bed, Crossthwaite knocked at my door, and, 
on being admitted, handed over to me a bundle wrapped up 
in paper. 

“There’s a pair of breeks for you — not plush ones, this 
time, old fellow — but you ought to look as smart as possible 
There’s so much in a man’s looking dignified, and all that, 
when he’s speechifying. So I’ve just brought you down my 
best black trowsers to travel in. We’re just of a size, you 
know ; little and good, like a Welshman’s cow. And if you 
tear them, why, we’re not like poor, miserable, useless aristo- 
crats ; tailors and sailors can mend their own rents.’’ And 
he vanished, whistling the Marseillaise. 

I went to bed and tossed about, fancying to myself fny 
journey, my speech, the faces of the meeting, among which 
Lillian’s would rise, in spite of all the sermons which I 
preached to myself on the impossibility of her being there, of 
my being known, of any harm happening from the move- 
ment; but I could not shake off the fear. If there were a 
riot, arising ! If any harm were to happen to her ! If — 
till, mobbed into fatigue by a rabble of such miserable hypo- 
thetic ghosts, I fell asleep, to dream that I was going to bo 
hanged for sedition, and that the mob were all staring and 
hooting at me, and Lillian clapping her hands and setting 
them on ; and I woke in an agony, to find Sandy Mackaye 
standing by my bedside with a light. 

“ Hoolie, laddie ! ye need na jump up that way. I’m no’ 
gaun, to burke ye the nicht ; but I canna sleep ; I’m sair 
misdoubtful o’ the thing. It seems a’ richt, an’ I’ve been 
praying for us, an’ that’s mickle for me, to be taught our 
way ; but I dinna see aught for ye but to gang. If your 
heart is richt with God in this matter, then he’s o’ your side, 
an’ I fear na what men may do to ye. An’ yet,_ye’re my 
Joseph, as it were, the son o’ my auld age, wi’ a coat o’ many 
colors, plush breeks included ; an’ gin aught take ye, ye’ll 
bring down my gray haftets wi’ sorrow to the grave !” 

The old man gazed at me as he spoke, with a deep, earn- 
est affection I had never seen in him before ; and the tears 
glistened in his eyes by the flaring candlelight, as he went on. 

“ I ha’ been reading the Bible the nicht. It’s strange 
how the words o’t rise up, and open themselves, whiles, to 
puir distractit bodies ; though, maybe, no’ always in just the 
orthodox way. An’ I fell on that, ‘ Behold, I send ye forth 
as larnb.s in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


241 


serpents an’ harmless as doves an’ that gave me comfort, 
laddie, for ye. Mind the warning; dinna gang wud, what- 
ever ye may see an’ hear ; it’s an ill way o’ showing pity, to 
gang daft anent it. Dinna talk magniloquently ; that’s the 
workman’s darling sin. An’ mind ye dinna go too deep wi’ 
them. Ye canna trust them to understand ye ; they’re puir 
foolish sheep that ha’ no shepherd — swine that ha’ no wash, 
rather. So cast na your pearls before swine, laddie, lest they 
trample them under their feet, an’ turn again an’ rend ye.” 

He went out, and I lay awake tossing till morning, making 
a thousand good resolutions — like the rest of mankind. 

L 


CHAPTER A XVI 11. 


THE MEN WHO ARE EATEN. 

With many instructions from our friends, and warnings from 
Mackaye, I started next day on my journey. When I last 
caught sight of the old man, he was gazing fixedly after me, 
and using liis pocket-handkerchief in a somewhat suspicious 
way. I had remarked how depressed he seemed, and my own 
spirits shared the depression. A presentiment of evil hung 
over me, which not even the excitement of the journey — to 
me a rare enjoyment — could dispel. I had no heart, somehow, 
to look at the country scenes around, which in general excited 
in me so much interest, and I tried to lose myself in summing 
up my stock of information on the question which 1 expected 
to hear discussed by the laborers. I found myself not alto- 
gether ignorant. The horrible disclosures of S. G. O., and 
the barbarous abominations of the Andover W^orkhouse, then 
fresh in the public mind, had had their due efiect on mine ; 
and, like most thinking artisans, I had acquainted myself tol- 
erably from books and newspapers with the general condition 
of the country laborers. 

I arrived in the midst of a dreary, treeless country, whose 
broad brown and gray fields were only broken by an occasional 
line of dark doleful firs, at a knot of thatched hovels, all sink- 
ing and leaning every way but the right, the windows patch- 
ed with paper, the door-ways stopped with filth, which sur- 
rounded a beer-shop. That was my destination — unpromising 
enough for any one but an agitator. If discontent and misery 
are preparatives for liberty — and they are — so strange and un- 
like ours are the ways of God — I was likely enough to find 
them there. 

I was welcomed by my intended host, a little pert snub- 
nosed shoemaker, who greeted me as his cousin from London 
— a relationship which it seemed prudent to accept. 

He took me into his little cabin, and there, with the assist- 
ance of a shrewd, good-natured wife, shared with me the best 
he had ; and after supper commenced, mysteriously and in 
trembling, as if the very walls might have ears, a rambling 
bitter diatribe on the wrongs and suflerings of the laborers ; 
which went on till late in the night, and which 1 shall spare 
my readers : for if they have cither brains or hearts, they 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOLl . 


243 


ought to know more than I can tell them, from the public 
prints, and indeed, from their own eyes — although, as a wise 
man says, there is nothing more difficult than to rnalre people 
see first the facts which lie under their own nose. 

Upon one point, however, which was new to me, he was 
very fierce — the custom of landlords letting the cottages with 
their farms, for the mere sake of saving themselves trouble ; 
thus giving up all power of protecting the poor man, and de- 
livering him over, bound hand and foot, even in the matter 
of his commonest home comforts, to farmers, too penurious, 
loo ignorant, and often too poor, to keep the cottages in a 
state fit for the habitation of human beings. Thus the poor 
man’s hovel, as well as his labor, became, he told me, a source 
of profit to the farmer, out of which he wrung the last droj) 
of gain. The necessary repairs were always put ofi'as long 
as possible — the laborers were robbed of their gardens — the 
slightest rebellion lost them not only work, but shelter from 
the elements ; the slavery under which they groaned perfetra- 
ted even to the fireside and to the bedroom. 

“ And who was the landlord of this parish ?” 

“ Oh ! he believed he was a very good sort of man, and 
uncommon kind to the people where he lived, but that was 
fifty miles away in another county ; and he liked that estate 
better than this, and never came down here, except for the 
shooting.” 

Full of many thoughts, and tired out with my journey, I 
went up to bed, in the same loft with the cobbler and his w’ife, 
and fell asleep, and dreamed of Lillian. 

About eight o’clock the next morning, I started forth with 
my guide, the shoemaker, over as desolate a country as men 
can w^ell conceive. Not a house was to be seen for miles, ex- 
cept the knot of hovels which w^e had left, and here and there 
a great dreary lump of farm-buildings, with its yard of yellow 
stacks. Beneath our feet the earth was iron, and the sky 
iron above our heads. Dark curled clouds, “ which had built 
up every where an under-roof of doleful gray,” swept on before 
the bitter northern wind, which whistled through the low 
leafless hedges and rotting wattles, and crisped the dark sod- 
den leaves of the scattered hollies, almost the only trees in 
sight. 

We trudged on, over wide stubbles, thick with innumerable 
weeds ; over wide fallows, in which the deserted plows stood 
frozen fast ; then over clover and grass, burnt black with frost , 


244 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


then over a field of turnips, where we passed a large fold of hur- 
dles, within which some hundred sheep stood, with their heads 
turned from the cutting blast. All was dreary, idle, silent ; 
no sound or sign of human beings. One wondered where the 
people lived, who cultivated so vast a tract of civilized, over- 
peopled, nineteenth-century England. As we came up to the 
fold, two little boys hailed us from the inside — two little 
wretches with blue noses and white cheeks, scarecrows of rags 
and patches, their feet peeping through bursten shoes twice 
too big for them, who seemed* to have shared between them a 
ragged pair of worsted gloves, and cowered among the sheep, 
- under the shelter of a hurdle, crying and inarticulate with 
cold. 

“ What’s the matter, boys ?” 

“ Turmits is froze, and us can’t turn the handle of the cut 
ler. Do ye gie us a turn, please !” 

We scrambled over the hurdles, and gave the miserable 
little creatures the benefit of ten minutes’ labor. They seem- 
ed too small for such exertion ; their little hands were purple 
with chilblains, and they were so sorefooted they could scarcely 
limp. I was surprised to find them at least three years older 
than their size and looks denoted, and still more surprised, too, 
to find that their salary for all this bitter exposure to the ele- 
ments — such as I believe I could not have endured two days 
running — was the vast sum of one shilling a week each, Sun- 
days included. “ They didn’t never go to school, nor to church 
nether, except just now and then, sometimes — they had to 
mind the shep.” 

I went on, sickened wdth the contrast between the highly- 
bred, over-fed, fat, thick-wooled animals, with their troughs 
of turnips and malt-dust, and their racks of rich clover-hay, 
and their little pent-house of rock-salt, having nothing to do 
but to eat and sleep, and eat again, and the little half-starved 
shivering animals who were their slaves. Man the master of 
the brutes ? Bah ! As society is now, the brutes, are the 
masters — the horse, the sheep, the bullock, is the master, and 
the laborer is their slave. “ Oh ! but the brutes are eaten !” 
Well ; the horses at least are not eaten — they live like land- 
lords, till they die. And those who are eaten, are certainly 
not eaten by their human servants. The sheep they fat, 
another kills, to parody Shelley ; and, after all, is not the 
laborer, as well as the sheep, eaten by you, rny dear Society 
— devoured body and soul, not the less really because you are 
longer about the meal, tliere being an old prejudice against 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 215 

Cannibalism, and also against murder — except after the Riot 
Act has been read. 

“ What !” shriek the insulted respectabilities, “have we not 
paid him his wages w^eekly, and has he not lived upon them?” 
Yes ; and have you not given your sheep and horses their 
daily wages, and have they not lived on them ? You wanted 
to work them ; and they could not Avork, you know, unless 
they were alive. But here lies your iniquity ; you gave the 
laborer nothing but his daily food — not even his lodgings; the 
pigs were not stinted of their wash to pay lor their stye-room, 
the man was ; and his wages, thanks to your competitive sys- 
tem. were beaten down deliberately and conscientiously (lor 
was it not according to political economy, and the laws there- 
of?) to the minimum oh which he could or would work, with 
out the hope or the possibility of saving a farthing. You 
know how* to invest your capital profitably, dear Society, and 
to save money over and above your income of daily comforts ; 
but what has he saved ? Avhat is he profited by all those years 
of labor ? He has kept body and soul together — perhaps he 
could have done that without you or your help. But his 
wages are used up every Saturday night. When he stops 
working, you have in your pocket the whole real profits of his 
nearly fifty years’ labor, and he has nothing. And then you say 
that you have not eaten him! Yon know, in your heart of 
hearts, that you have.' Else, why in Heaven’s name do you 
pay him poor’s rates ? If, as you say, he has been duly repaid 
in wages, what is the meaning of that half-a-crown a week ? 
you owe him nothing. Oh, but the man would starve — com- 
mon humanity forbids! What now. Society ? Give him 
alms, if you wdll, on the score of humanity ; but do not tax 
people for his support, wdiether they choose or not — that were 
a mere tyranny and robbery. If the landlord’s feelings will 
not allow him to see the laborer starve, let him give, in God’s 
name ; but let him not cripple and drain, by compulsory poor- 
rates, the farmer who has paid him his “just remuneration” 
of wages, and the parson Avho probably, out of his scanty in- 
c.ome, gives away twice as much in alms as the landlord does 
out of his superfluous one. No, no; as long as you retain 
compulsory poor-laws, you confess that it is not merely humane 
but just, to pay the laborer more than his wages. You con- 
fess yourself in debt to him, over and above, an uncertain sum 
which it suits you not to define, because such an investigation 
would expose ugly gaps and patches in that same snug com- 
petitive and property world of yours ; and, therefore, being the 


246 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


stronger party, you compel your debtor to give up the claim 
which you confess for an annuity of half-a-crown a week — that 
being the just-above-starving-point of the economic thermome- 
ter ! And yet you say you have not oaten the laborer. You 
see, we workmen too have our thoughts about political econ- 
omy, differing slightly from yours, truly, just as the man who 
is being hanged may take a somewhat different view of the 
process from the man who is hanging him ; which view is 
likely to be the more practical one ? 

With some such thoughts I walked across the open down, 
toward a circular camp, the earthwork, probably of some old 
British town. Inside it, some thousand or so of laboring peo- 
ple were swarming restlessly round a single large block of 
stone, some relic of Druid times, on which a tall man stood, 
his dark figure thrown out in bold relief against the dreary 
sky. As we pushed through the crowd, I was struck with 
the wan, haggard look of all faces ; their lack-lustre eyes and 
drooping lips, stooping shoulders, heavy, dragging steps, gave 
them a crushed, dogged air, which was infinitely painful, am’ 
bespoke a grade of misery more habitual and degrading than 
that of the excitable and passionate artisan. 

There were many women among them, talking shruly, and 
looking even more pinched and wan than the men. I remark- 
ed, also, that many of the crowd carried heavy sticks, pitch- 
forks, and other tools which might be used as fearful weapons 
— an ugly sign, which I ought to have heeded betimes. 

They glared with sullen curiosity at me and my Londoner’s 
clothes, as, with no small feeling of self-importance, I pushed 
my way to the foot of the stone. The man who stood on it 
seemed to have been speaking some time. His words, like 
all I heard that day, were utterly devoid of any thing like 
eloquence or imagination — a dull string of somewhat ineohe- 
rent complaints, which derived their force only from the in- 
tense earnestness, which attested their truthfulness. As far 
as I can recollect, I will give the substance of what I heard. 
But, indeed, I heard nothing but what has been bandied 
about from newspaper to newspaper for years — confessed by 
all parties, deplored by all parties, but never an attempt made 
to remedy it. 

— “ Thae farmers makes slaves on us. I can’t hear no 
difference between a Christian and a nigger, exeept they flogs 
the niggers and starves the Christians ; and I don’t know 

which I’d choose. I served Farmer seven year, off and 

on, and arter harvest he tells me he’s no more work for mo 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


217 


nor my h^y, neither, acause he’s getting too big for him, so ho 
gets a little ’un instead, and we does nothing ; and my boy 
lies about, getting into bad ways, like hundreds more : and 
then we goes to board, and they bids us go and look for work ; 
and we goes up next part to London. I couldn’t get none ; 
they’d enough to do, they said, to employ their own ; and w'e 
begs our way home, and goes into the Union ; and they turns 
us out again in two or three days, and promises us work again, 
and gives us two days’ gravel-pecking, and then says they has 
no more for ns ; and we was sore pinched, and laid a-bed all 
day ; then next board-day we goes to ’em, and they gives us 
one day more — and that threw us off another week, and then 
next board-day we goes into the Union again for three days, 
and gets sent out again : and so I’ve been starving one-half 
of the time, a'nd they putting us off and on o’ purpose like 
that ; and I’ll bear it no longer, and that’s what I says.” 

He came down, and,;j^all, powerful, well-fed man, evident- 
ly in his Sunday smock-m)ck and clean yellow leggings, got 
up and began ; 

“ I havn’t no complaint to make about myself I’ve a 
good master, and the parson’s a right kind ’un, and that’s 
more than all can say, and the squire’s a real gentleman ; and 
my master, he don’t need to lower his wages. I gets my ten 
shillings a week all the year round, and harvesting, and a pig, 
and a ’lotment — and that’s just why I come here. If I can 
get it, why can’t you ?” 

“ ’Cause our masters baint like yourn.” 

“ No, by George, there baint no money round here away 
like that, I can tell you.” 

“And why aint they?” continued the speaker. “ There’s 
the shame on it. There’s my master can grow five quarters 
where yourn only grows three; and so he can live and pay 
like a man ; and so he say he don’t care for free trade. You 
know, as well as I, that there’s not half o’ the land round 
here grows what it ought. They aint no money to make it 
grow more, and besides, they won’t employ no hands to keep 
it clean. I come across more weeds in one field here, than 
I’ve seen for nine year on our farm. Why arn’t some o’ you 
a-getting thae w^eeds up ? It ’ud pay ’em to farm better — 
arid they knows that, but they’re too lazy ; if they can just 
get a living off the land, they don’t care ; and they’d sooner 
save money out o’ your w^ages, than save it by growing more 
corn— it’s easier for ’em, it is. There’s the work to be done, 
and they won’t let you do it. There’s you crying out foi 


248 


ALTON. LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


work, and work crying out for you — and nether of you can 
get to the other. I say that’s a shame, I do. I say a' poor 
man’s a slave. He daren’t leave his parish — nobody won’t 
employ him, as can employ his own folk. And if he stays in 
his parish, it’s just a chance whether he gets a good master or 
a bad ’un. He can’t choose, and that’s a shame, it is. Why 
should he go starving because his master don’t care 1o do the 
best by the land ? If they can’t till the land, I say let them 
get out of it, and let them work it as can. And I think as 
we ought all to sign a petition to government, to tell ’em all 
about it; though I don’t see as how they could help us, unless 
they’d make a law to force the squires to put in nobody to a 
farm as hadn’t money to work it fairly.” 

“ I says,” said the next speaker, a poor fellow whose sen- 
tences were continually broken by a hacking cough, “just 
what he said. If they can’t till the land, let them do it as 
can. But they won’t ; they won’t let us have a scrap on it, 
though we’d pay ’em more for it nor ever they’d make for 
themselves. But they says it ’ud make us too independent, 
if we had an acre or so o’ land ; and so it ’ud, for they. And 
so I says as he did — they want to make slaves on us alto 
gether, just to get the flesh and bones ofl’ us at their own 
price. Look you at this here down. If I had an acre on it, 
to make a garden on. I’d live w'ell with my w^ages, ofl' and 
on. Why, if this here was in garden, it ’ud be worth twenty, 
forty times, o’ that it be now. And last spring I lays out o’ 
work from Christmas till barley-sowing, and I goes to the 
farmer and axes for a bit a land to dig and plant a few pota- 
toes — and he says, ‘ You be d — d ! If you’re minding your 
garden after hours, you’ll not be fit to do a proper day’s work 
tor me in hours — and I shall want you by-and-by, when the 
weather breaks’ — for it was frost most bitter, it was. ‘ Ain^ 
if you gets potatoes you’ll be getting a pig — and then you’ll 
want straw, and meal to fat ’un — and then I’ll not trust you 
in my barn, I can tell ye ;’ and so there it was. And if I’d 
had only one half-acre of this here very down as we stands on, 
as isn’t worth five shillings a year — and I’d a given ten shil- 
lings for it — my belly wouldn’t a’ been empty^iow. Oh, they 
be dogs in the manger, and the Lord’ll reward ’em therefor’ ! 
First they says they can’t afford to work the land ’emselves, 
and then they waint let us work it either. Then they says 
prices is so low they can’t keep us on, and so they lowers our 
wages ; and then when prices goes up ever so much, our wages 
don’t go up with ’em. So, high prices or low prices, it's all 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 24^ 

the same. With the one we can’t buy bread, and with the 
other we can’t get work. 1 don’t mind free trade — not I ; to 
be sure, if tlie loaf’s cheap, we shall be ruined ; but if the 
loaf’s dear, we shall be starved — and for that, we is starved, 
now. Nobody don’t care for us; for my part I don’t much 
care for myself. A man must die some time or other. Only 
I thinks if we could sometime or other just see the Queen 
once, and tell her all about it, she’d take our part, and not sec 
IIS put upon like that, I do.” 

“ Gentlemen !” cried my guide, the shoemaker, in a some- 
what conceited and dictatorial tone, as he skipped up by the 
speaker’s side, and gently shouldered him dowm, “ It an’t like 
the ancient times as I’ve read of, when any poor man as had 
a petition could come promiscuously to the King’s royal pres- 
ence, and put it direct into his own hand, and be treated like 
a gentleman. Don’t you know as how they locks up the 
Queen nowadays, and never lets a poor soul come anear her, 
lest she should hear the truth of all their iniquities ? Why, 
they never lets her stir out without a lot o’ dragoons with 
drawn swords, riding all around her ; and if you dared to go up 
to her to ax mercy, whoot ! they’d chop your head off before you 
could say ‘Please your Majesty' And then the hypocrites 
say it’s to keep her from being frightened — and that’s true — 
for its frightened she’d be, with a vengeance, if she knowed 
all that thae grand folks make poor laborers suffer, to keep 
themselves in power and great glory. I tell ye, ’tarnt per- 
practicable, at all, to ax the Queen for any thing ; she’s afeard 
of her life on ’em. You just take my advice, and sign a round- 
robin to the squires — you tell ’em as you’re willing to till the 
land for ’em, if they’ll let you. There’s draining and digging 
enough to be done as ’ud keep ye all in work, arn’t there ?” 

“ Ay, ay ; there’s lots o’ work to be done, if so be we 
could get at it. Every body knows that.” 

“ Well, you tell ’em that. Tell ’em here’s hundreds and 
hundreds of ye starving, and willing to work ; and then tell 
’em, if they wont find ye work, they shall find ye meat. 
There’s lots o’ victuals in their larders now ; haven’t you as 
good a right to^it as their jackanapes o’ footmen ? The squires 
is at the bottom of it all. What do you stupid fellows go 
grumbling at the farmers for? Don’t thae squires tax the 
land twenty or thirty shilling.s an acre ; and what do they do 
lor that ? The best of ’em, if he gels five thousand a year 
out o’ the land, don’t give back five hundred in charity, or 
schools, or poor-rates — -and what’s that to speak of? And 


250 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


the main of ern — curse ’em ! — they drains the money out of 
the land, and takes it up to London, or into foreign parts, to 
spend on fine clothes and fine dinners ; or throws it away at 
elections, to make folks beastly drunk, and sell their souls for 
money — and we gets no good on it. I’ll tell you what it s 
come to, my men — that we can’t afford no more landlords. 
We can’t afford ’em, and that’s the truth of it !” 

The crowd growled a dubious assent. 

“ O, yes, you can grumble at the farmers, acause you deals 
with them first-hand ; but you be too stupid to do aught but 
hunt by sight. I be an old dog, and I hunts cunning. I sees 
farther than my nose, I does. I larnt politics to London 
when I was a prentice ; and I ain’t forgotten the plans of it. 
Look you here. The farmers, they say they can’t live unless 
they can make four rents, one for labor, and one for stock, and 
one for rent, and one for themselves ; ain’t that about right 1 
Very well; just now they can’t make four rents — in course 
they can’t. Now, who’s to suffer for that? — the farmer as 
works, or the laborer as works, or the landlord as does noth- 
ing ? But he takes care on himself. He won’t give up his 
rent — not he. Perhaps he might give back ten per cent., 
and what’s that ? — two shillings an acre, maybe. What’s 
that, if corn falls two pound a load, and more ? Then the 
farmer gets a stinting ; and he can’t stint hisself, he’s bad 
enough off already : he’s forty shillings out o’ pocket on everj 
load of wheat — that’s eight shillings, maybe, on every acre of 
his land on a four-course shift — and where’s the eight shillings 
to come from, for the landlord’s only giving him back two on 
it ? He can’t stint hisself, he daren’t stint his stock, and so 
he stints the laborers ; and so it’s you as pays the landlord’s 
rent — you, my boys, out o’ your flesh and bones, you do — and 
you can’t afford it any longer, by the look of you — so just tell 
’em so !” 

This advice seemed to me as sadly unpractical as the rest. 
In short, there seemed to be no hope, no purpose, among them 
— and they felt it ; and I could hear, from the running com- 
ment of murmurs, that they were getting every moment more 
fierce and desperate at the contemplation of their own help- 
lessness — a mood which the next speech was not likely tc 
soften. 

A pale, thin woman scrambled up on the stone, and stood 
there, her scanty and patched garments fluttering in the bitter 
breeze, as, with face sharpened with want, and eyes fierce 
with misery, .she began, in a querulous, scornful falsetto * 


ALTO.N LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


251 


“1 am an honest woman. I brought up seven children 
decently, and never axed the parish for a farden, till my 
husband died. Then they tells me I can support myself and 
mine — and so I does. Early and late I hoed turmits, and 
early and late I rep, and lel't the children at home to mind 
each other ; and one on ’em fell into the fire, and is gone to 
heaven, blessed angel ! and two more it pleased the Lord to 
take in the fever ; and the next, I hope, will soon be out o’ 
this miserable, sinful world. But look you here : three weeks 
agone, I goes to the board. I had no work. They say they 
could not relieve me for the first w^eek, because I had money 
yet to take. The hypocrites ! they knowing as I couldn’t but 
owe it all, and a lot more beside. Next week they sends the 
officer to inquii-e. That was ten days gone, and we starving. 
Then, on board-day, they gives me two loaves. Then, next 
w'eek, they takes it oft" again. And when I goes over (five 
miles) to the board to ax why — they’d find me work — and 
they never did ; and so we goes on starving for another week 
— for no one wouldn’t trust us; how could they, when Ave 
was in debt already a whole lot ?— you’re all in debt I” 

“ That we are.” 

“ There’s some here as never made ten shillings a week in 
their lives, as owes twenty pounds at the shop!” 

“ Ay, and more — and how’s a man ever to pay that ?” 

“ So this week, when I comes, they offers me the house 
Would I go into the house ? They’d be glad to have me, 
acause I’m strong and hearty and a good nurse. But would I, 
that am an honest w'oman, go to live with thae offscourings — 
thae” — (she used a strong word) — “ would I be parted from 
my children ? Would I let them hear the talk, and keep 
the company as they will there, and learn all sorts o’ sins that 
they ncA'^er heard on, blessed be God ! I’ll starve first, and 
see them starve too — though. Lord knows, it’s hard. Oh ! 
it’s hard,” she said, bursting into tears — “ to leave them as I 
did this morning, crying after their breakfasts, and I none to 
ffive ’em. I’ve got no bread — where should I ? I’ve got no 
fire — how can I give one shilling and sixpence a hundred for 
coals? And if I did, who’d fetch ’em home? And if I 
dared break a hedge for a nitch o’ wood, they’d put me in 
pri.son, they would, with the worst — what be I to do ? 
What be you going to do ? That’s what I came here for. 
What be ye going to do for us women — us that starve and 
stint, and wear our hands oft" for you men and your children, 
and get hard words, and hard blows from you ? Oh ! if i 


252 


A.LTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


was a man, I know what I’d do, I do! But I don’t think 
you be men, three parts o’ you, or you’d not see the widow 
and the orphan starve as you do, and sit quiet and grumble, 
as long as you can keep your own bodies and souls together. 
Eh ! ye cowards !” 

What more she Avould have said in her excitement, which 
had risen to an absolute scream, I can not tell ; but some 
prudent friend pulled her down off the stone, to be succeeded 
by a speaker more painful, if possible ; an aged blind man, 
the worn-out melancholy of whose slow, feeble voice made my 
heart sink, and hushed the murmuring crowd into silent awe. 

Slowly he turned his gray, sightless head from side to side, 
as if feeling for the faces below him — and then began ; 

“I heard you was all to be here — and I suppose you are; 
and I said I would come — though I suppose they’ll take off 
my pay, if they hear of it. But I knows the reason of it, and 
the bad times and all. The Lord revealed it to me as clear 
as day, four year agone come Easter-tide. It’s all along of 
our sins, and our wickedness — because we forgot Him — it is. 
I mind the old war times, what times they was, when there 
was smuggled brandy up and down in every public, and work 
more than hands could do. And then how we all forgot the 
Lord, and went after our o.wn lusts and pleasures — squires 
and parsons, and farmers and laboring folk, all alike. They 
oughted to ha’ knowed better — and we oughted too. Many’s 
the Sunday I spent in skittle-playing, and cock-fighting, and 
the pound I spent in beer, as might ha’ been keeping me now. 
We was an evil and perverse generation — and so one o’ my 
sons went for a sodger, and was shot at Waterloo, and the 
other fell into evil ways, and got sent across seas — and I be 
left alone for my sins. But the Lord was very gracious to 
me, and showed me how it was all a judgment on my sins, 
he did. lie has turned his face from us, and that’s why 
we’re troubled. And so I don’t see no use in this meeting. 
It won’t do no good ; nothing won’t do us no good, unless we 
all repent of our wicked ways, our drinking, and our dirt, and 
our love-children, and our picking and stealing, and gets the 
Lord to turn our hearts, and to come back again, and have 
mercy on us, and take us away speedily out of this wretched 
world, where there’s nothing but misery and sorrow, into His 
everlasting glory. Amen ! Folks say as the day of judgment’s 
a coming soon — and I partly think so myself I wish it was 
all over, and we in heaven above ; and that’s all I have to 
say.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 2:^3 

It seemed a not unnatural revulsion, Avhen a tall, fierce 
mail, with a forbidding squint, sprung jauntily on the stone, 
and setting his arms a-kimbo, broke out : 

“Here be I, Blinkey, and I has as good a right to speak 
as ere a one. You’re all blamed fools, you are. So’s that 
old blind buffer there. You sticks like pigs in a gate, holler- 
ing and squeaking, and never helping yourselves. Why can’t 
you do like me ? I never docs no work — darned if I’ll work 
to please the farmers. The rich folks robs me, and I robs 
them, and that’s fair and equal. You only turn poachers — 
you only go stealing turmits, and fire-ud, and all as you can 
find — and then you’ll not need to work. Arn’t it yourn ? 
The game’s no one’s, is it now ? you know that. And if 
you takes turmits or corn, they’re yourn — you helped to 
grown ’em. And if you’re put to prison, I tell ye, it’s a 
darned deal warmer, and better victuals too, than ever a one 
of you gets at home, let alone the Union. Now I knows the 
dodge. Whenever my wife’s ready for her trouble, I gets 
cotched ; then I lives like a prince in jail, and she goes to the 
workus ; and when it’s all over, start fair again. Oh ! you 
blockheads ! to stand here shivering with empty bellies. You 
just go down to the farm and burn thae stacks over the old 
rascal’s head ; and then they that let you starve now, will 
be forced to keep you then. If you can’t get your share of 
the poor-rates, try the county rates, my bucks — you can get 
fat on them at the Queen’s expense — and that’s more than 
you’ll do in ever a Union as I hear on: Who’ll come down 
and pull the farm about the folks’ ears ? Warnt it he as 
turned five on yer off last week ? and aint he more corn there 
than ’ud feed you all round this day, and won’t sell it, just be- 
cause he’s waiting till folks are starved enough, and prices rise? 
Curse the old villain ! who’ll help to disappoint him o’ that ? 
Come along!” 

A confused murmur arose, and a movement in the crowd. 
I felt that now or never was the time to speak. If once the 
spirit of mad, aimless riot broke loose, I had not only no 
chance of a hearing, but every likelihood of being implicated 
in deeds which I abhorred ; and I sprung on the stone and 
entreated a few minutes’ attention, telling them that I was a 
deputation from one of the London Chartist committees. 
This seemed to turn the stream of their thoughts, and they 
gaped in stupid wonder at me, as I began, hardly less excited 
than themselves. 

I assured them of the sympathy of the London working- 


254 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


m6n, made a comment on their own speeches — which the 
reader ought to be able to make for himself, and told them 
that I had come' to entreat their assistance toward obtaining 
such a parliamentary representation as would secure them 
their rights. I explained the idea of the Charter, and begged 
for theii help in carrying it out. 

To all which they answered surlily, that they did not know 
any thing about politics — that what they wanted was bread. 

I went on, more vehement than ever, to show them how 
all their misery sprung (as I then fancied) from being unre- 
presented — how the laws were made by the rich for the poor, 
and not by all for all — how the taxes bit deep into the neces- 
saries of the laborer, and only nibbled at the luxuries of the 
rich — how the criminal code exclusively attacked the crimes 
to which the poor were prone, while it dared not interfere 
with the subtler iniquities of the high-born and wealthy — how 
poor-rates, as I have just said, were a confession on the part 
of society that the laborer was not fully remunerated. I tried 
to make them see that their interests, as much as common 
justice, demanded that they should have a voice in the 
councils of the nation, such as would truly proclaim their 
wants, their rights, their wrongs ; and I have seen no reason 
since then to unsay my words. 

To all which they answered, that their stomachs were 
empty, and they wanted bread. “ And bread we will have !” 

“ Go. then,” I cried, losing my self-possession between dis- 
appointment and the maddening desire of influence — and, 
indeed, wdio could near their story, or even look upon their 
hices, and not feel some indignation stir in him, unless self- 
interest had drugged his heart and conscience, “ go,” I cried. 
“ and get bread ! After all, you have a right to it No man 
is bound to starve. There are rights above all laws, and the 
right to live is one. Laws were made for man, not man for 
laM^s. If you had made the laws yourselves, they might bind 
you even in this extremity ; but they were made in spite of 
you — against you. They rob you, crush you ; even now they 
deny you bread. God has made the earth free to all, like the 
air and sunshine, and you are shut out from ofl'it. The earth 
is yours, for you till it. Without you it would be a desert 
Go and demand your share of that corn, the fruit of your own 
industry. What matter, if your tyrants imprison, murder 
you ? they can but kill your bodies at once, instead of killing 
them piecemeal, as they do now ; and your blood will cry 
against them from the ground ! I Ay. woe !” I went on. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


255 


carried away by feelings for which I shall make no apology ; 
for, however confused, there was, and is, and ever will be, a 
God’s truth in them, as this generation will find out at the 
moment when its own serene self-satisfaction crumbles under- 
neath it, “ Woe unto those that grind the faces of the poor ! 
Woe unto those who add house to house, and field to field, 
till they stand alone in the land, and there is no room left for 
the poor man ! The wages of their reapers, which they have 
held back by fraud, cry out against them ; and their cry has 
entered into the ears of the God of Heaven — ” 

But I had no time to finish. The murmur swelled into a 
roar, for “ Bread ! Bread !” My hearers had taken me at 
my word. I had raised the spirit ; could I command him, 
now he was abroad ? ^ , 

Go to Jennings’s Farm I’^ 

“ No ! he aint no corn, he sold un all last week.” 

“ There’s plenty at the Hall Farm I Rouse out the old 
steward !” 

And, amid yells and execrations, the whole mass poured 
down the hill, sweeping me away with them. I was shocked 
and terrified at their threats. 1 tried again and again to stop 
and harangue them. I shouted myself hoarse about the duty 
of honesty ; warned them against pillage and violence ; en- 
treated them to take nothing but the corn which they actually 
needed ; but my voice was drowned in the uproar. Still I 
felt myself in a measure responsible for their conduct ; 1 had 
helped to excite them, and dared not, in honor, desert them ; 
and, trembling, I went on, prepared to see the worst ; follow- 
ing, as a flag of distress, a mouldy crust, brandished on the 
point of a pitchfork. 

Bursting through the rotting and half-fallen palings, wo 
entered a wide, ru.<.:Ly, neglected park, and along an old gravel 
road, now green with grass, we opened on a sheet of frozen 
water, and, on the opposite bank the huge square corpse of a 
Hall, the close shuttered windows of which gave it a dead and 
ghastly look, except where here and there a single open one 
showed, as through a black empty eye-socket, the dark unfur- 
nished rooms within. On the right, beneath us, lay, amid 
tall elms, a large mass of farm-buildings, into the yard of 
which the whole mob rushed tumultuously — just in time to 
sec an old man on horseback dart out and gallop hatless up 
the park, amid the yells of he mob. 

“ The old rascal’s gone ! and he'll call up the yeomanry. 
We must be quick, boys!” shouted one; and the first signs 





25,1 ALTON LOCKL, TAILOR AND POET. 

of plur.ler showed themselves in an indiscriminate chase after 
various screaming geese and turkeys ; while a few of the more 
steady went up to the house-door, and, knocking, demanded 
sternly the granary keys. 

A fat virago planted herself in the doorway, and com- 
menced railing at them, with the cowardly courage which the 
fancied immunity of their sex gives to coarse women ; but she 
was hastily shoved aside, and took shelter in an upper room, 
where she stood screaming and cursing at the wdndow. 

The invaders returned, cramming their mouths with bread, 
and chopping asunder flitches of bacon. The granary-doors 
were broken ojicn, and the contents scrambled for, amid im- 
mense waste, by the starving wretches. It was a sad sight. 
Here was a poor shivering woman, hiding scraps of food under 
her cloak, and hurrying out of the yard to the children she 
had left at home. There was a tall man, leaning against 
the palings, gnawing ravenously at the same loaf with a little 
boy, who had scrambled up behind him. Then a huge black- 
guard came whistling up to me, with a can of ale. “ Drink, 
my beauty ! you’re dry with hollering by now !” 

“ The ale is neither yours nor mine ; I won’t touch it.” 

“ Darn your buttons ! You said the wheat was ourn, acause 
we growcd it — and thereby so’s the beer — for Ave growed the 
barley too.” 

And so thought the rest ; for the yard was getting full of 
drunkards, a woman or two among them, reeling knee-deep 
in the loose straw among the pigs. 

“ Thresh out thae ricks !” roared another. 

“ Get out the threshing-machine !” 

“ You harness the horses !” 

“No! there baint no time. Yeomanry ’ll be here. You 
mun leave the ricks.” 

“ Darned if we do. Old Woods shan’t get nought by they.” 

“ Fire ’em, then, and go on to Slater’s l^arm !” 

“ As well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb,” hiccupped 
Blinkey, as he rushed through the yard with a lighted brand. 
I tried to stop him, but fell on my lace in the deep straw, and 
got round the barns to the rick-yard, just in time to hear a 
crackle — there Avas no mistaking it ; the windAvard stack was 
in a blaze of fire. 

I stood awe-struck — I can not tell hoAv long — watching 
how the live flame snakes crept and hissed, and leapt and 
roared, and rushed in long horizontal jets from stack to stack 
l)efore the howling Avind, and fastened their fieiy talons on the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


257 


barn-eaves, and swept over the peaked roofs, and hurled them- 
selves in fiery flakes into the yard beyond — the food of man, 
the labor of years, devoured in aimless ruin I — Was it my 
doing ? Was it not ? 

At last I recollected myself, and ran round again into the 
straw-yard, where the fire was now falling fast. The only 
thing which saved the house v/as the weltering mass of bul- 
locks, pigs, and human beings drunk and sober, which tram- 
pled out unwittingly the flames as fast as they caught. 

The fire had seized the roofs of the cart-stables, when a 
great lubberly boy blubbered out : 

“ Git my horses out ! git my horses out o’ the fire ! I be so 
fond o’ mun !” 

“ Well, they aint done no harm, poor beasts !” and a dozen 
men ran in to save them ; but the poor wretches, screaming 
with terror, refused to stir. I never knew what became of 
them — but their shrieks still haunt my dreams 

The yard now became a pandemonium. The more ruffian- 
ly part of the mob — and alas ! there were but too many of 
them — hurled the furniture out of the windows, or ran off 
with any thing that they could carry. In vain 1 expostulated 
and threatened ; I was answ’ered by laughter, curses, frantic- 
dances, and brandished plunder. Then 1 first found out how 
large a portion of rascality shelters itself under the wing of 
every crowd ; and at the moment, I almost excused the rich 
for overlooking the real sufferers, in indignation at the rascals. 
But even the really starving majority, whose faces proclaim- 
ed the grim fact of their misery, seemed gone mad for the 
moment. The old crust of sullen, dogged patience had broken 
up, and their w^hole souls had exploded into reckless fury 
and brutal revenge — and yet there was no hint of violence 
against the red fat woman, who, surrounded with her blub- 
bering children, stood screaming and cursing at the first-floor 
window, getting redder and fatter at every scream. The 
worst personality she heard was a roar of laughter, in which, 
such is poor humanity, I could not but join, as her little 
starved drab of a maid-of-all-work ran out of the door, with 
a bundle of stolen finery under her arm, and high above the 
roaring of the flames, and the shouts of the rioters, rose her 
mistress’s yell : 

“Oh Betsey! Betsey! you little a.wdacious unremorseful 
hussey ! a-running away with my best bonnet and shawl !” 

The laughter soon, however, subsided, when a man rushed 
breathless mto the yard, shouting, “ The yeomanry !” 


258 ^ ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

At that soimd, to ray astonishraent, a general panic ensued 
The miserable wretches never stopped to inquire how many, 
or how far of}', they were — but scrambled to every outlet of 
the yard, trampling each other dowm in their hurry. I leaped 
up on the wall, and saw, galloping down the park, a mighty 
armament of some fifteen men, with a tall officer at their 
head, mounted on a splendid horse. 

There they be ! there they be ! all the varmers, and young 
Squire Clayton wi’ mun, on his gray hunter ! O Lord ! O 
Lord ! and all their swords drawn !” 

I thought of the old story in Herodotus — how the Scythian 
masters returned from war to the rebel slaves who had taken 
possession of their lands and W'ives, and brought them down 
on their knees with terror, at the mere sight of the old dreaded 
dog- whips. 

I did not care to run. I was utterly disgusted, disappointed 
with myself — the people. I longed, for the moment, to die 
and leave it all ; and left almost alone, sat down on a stone, 
buried my head between my hands, and tried vainly to shut 
out from my ears the roaring of the fire. 

At that moment “ Blinkey” staggered out past me and 
against me, a writing-desk in his hands, shouting, in his 
drunken glory, “ I’ve vound ut at last! I’ve got the old fel- 
low’s money I Hush ! What a vule I be, hollering like that I” 
And he was going to sneak ofT, with a face of drunken cun- 
ning, when I sprung up and seized him by the throat. 

“ Rascal ! robber ! lay that down ! Have you not done 
mischief enough already ]” 

“ I wain’t have no sharing. What ? Do you want un 
yourself, eh ? Then we’ll see who's the stronger !” 

And in an instant he shook me from him, and dealt me 
a blow with the corner of the desk, that laid me on the 
ground . 

I just recollect the tramp of the yeomanry horses, and the 
gleam and jingle of their arms, as they galloped into the yard. 
I caught a glimpse of the tall young officer, as his great gray 
horse sw'ept through the air over the high yard-pales — a feat 
to me utterly astonishing. Half-a-dozen long strides — the 
wretched ruffian, staggering across the field with his booty, 
was caught up. The clear blade gleamed in the air— and 
then a fearful yell — and after that I recollect nothing. 

Slowly 1 recovered my consciousness. I was lying on a 
truckle-bed — stone walls and a grated window ! A man stood 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. Sol) 

over me with a large bunch of keys in his hand. He had 
been wrapping my head with wet towels. I knew, instinct- 
ively, where 1 was. 

“ Well, young man,” said he, in a not unkindly tone— 
and a nice job you’ve made of it I Do you know where you 
are ?” . 

“Yes,” answered I, quietly ; “in D jaii.” 

“ Exactly so !” 


CHAPTER XXIX. 
THE TRIAL. 


The day was cornc — quickly, thank Heaven ; and I stood 
at the bar, with four or five miserable, haggard laborers, to 
take my trial for sedition, riot, and arson. 

I had passed the intervening weeks half stupefied with the 
despair of utter disappointment : disappointment at myself 
and my own loss of self-possession, which had caused all my 
misfortune, perhaps, too, and the thought was dreadful, that 
of my wretched fellow-sufferers, disappointment with the 
laborers, with The Cause; and when the thought came over 
me, in addition, that I was irreparably disgraced in the eyes 
of my late patrons, parted forever from Lillian by rny own 
folly, I laid down my head, and longed to die. 

Then, again, I would recover awhile, and pluck up heart. 
1 would plead my cause myself — I would testify against the 
tyrants to their face — I would say no longer to their besotted 
slaves, but to the men themselves, “ Go to, ye rich men, weep 
and howl ! The hire of your laborers who have reaped down 
vour fields, which is by you kept back by fraud, crieth ; and 
tne cries of them that have reaped hath entered into the ears 
of the Lord God of Hosts.” I would brave my fate — I would 
die protesting, and glory in my martyrdom. But — 

“ Martyrdom ?” said Mackaye, who had come up to D , 

and was busy night and day about my trial. “ Ye’ll just leave 
alone the martyr dodge, my puir bairn. Ye’re na martyr 
at a’, ye’ll understand, but a verra foolish callant, that lost 
his temper, an’ cast his pearls before swine — an’ very question- 
able pearls they, too, to judge by the price they fetch i’ the 
market.” 

And then my heart sank again. And a few days before 
the trial a letter came, evidently in my cousin’s handwriting, 
though only signed with his initials : 


“ Sir — You are in a very great scrajic — you will not deny 
that. How you will get out of it depends on your own com- 
mon sense. You probably won’t be hanged — lor nobody be- 
lieves that you had a hand in burning the farm ; but, unless 
you take care, ycu will be transiiorted. Call yourself ‘John 
Nokes ; intrust your case to a clever lawyer, and keep in the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


261 


background. I warn you as a friend — if you try to speechify, 
and play the martyr, and let out who you are, the respectable 
people who have been patronizing you will find it necessary, 
for their own sakes, to clap a stopper on you for good and ail, 
to make you out an impos-tor and a swindler, and get you out 
of the way for life : while, if you are quiet, it will suit them 
to be quiet too, and say nothing about you, if you say nothing 
about them ; and then there will be a chance that they, as 
well as your own family, will do every thing in their power 
to hush the matter up. So, again, don’t let out your real 
name ; and instruct your lawyers to know nothing about the 
W.’s; and then perhaps the queen’s counsel will know noth- 
ing about them either. Mind, you are warned, and woe to 
you if you are fool enough not to take the warning. 

“G. L.” 

Plead in a false name ! Never, so help me Heaven ! To 
go into court with a lie in my mouth — to make myself an im- 
postor — probably a detected one — it seemed the most cunning 
scheme for ruining me, which my evil genius could have sug- 
gested, whether or not it might serve his OAvn selfish ends. 
But as for the other hints, they seemed not unreasonable, and 
promised to save me trouble ; while the continued pressure of 
anxiety and responsibility was getting intolerable to my over- 
wearied brain. So I showed the letter to Mackaye, who 
then told me that he had taken for granted that I should 
come to my right mind, and had therefore already engaged an 
old compatriot as attorney, and the best counsel which money 
could procure. 

“But where did you get the money ? You have not surely 
been spending your own savings on me?” 

“ I canna say that I M^adna ha’ so dune, in case o’ need 
But the men in town just subscribit ; puir honest fellows.” 

“What ! is my folly to be the cause of robbing them of 
their slender earnings ? Never, Mackaye ! Besides, they 
can not have subscribed enough to pay the barrister whom 
you just mentioned. Tell me the whole truth, or, pos’tively 
I will plead my cause myself.” 

“ Aweel, then, there was a bit bank-note or twa cam’ to 
hand — I canna say whaur fra’. But they that sent it direckit 
it to be expendit in the defense o’ the sax prisoners — whereof 
ye make ane.” 

Again a world of fruitless conjecture. It must be the same 
unknown friend who had paid my debt to my cousin — Lillian ] 


262 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


And so the day was come. I am not going to make a long 
picturesque description of my trial — trials have become lately 
quite hackneyed subjects, stock properties for the fiction-mon- 
gers — neither indeed, could 1 do so if I would. 1 recollect 
nothing of that day, but fragments — flashes of waking exist- 
ence, scattered up and down in what seemed to me a whole 
life of heavy, confused, painful dreams, with the glare of all 
those faces concentrated on me — those countless eyes which I 
could not, could not meet — stony, careless, unsympatbizing — 
not even angry — only curious. If they had but frowned on 
me, insulted me, gnashed their teeth on me, I could have 
glared back defiance ; as it was, I stood cowed and stupefied, 
a craven by the side of cravens. 

Let me see — what can I recollect? Those faces — faces — 
every where faces — a faint, sickly smell of flowers — a perpet- 
ual whispering and rustling of dresses — and all through it, 
the voice of some one talking, talking — I seldom knew what, 
or whether it was counsel, witness, judge, or prisoner, that 
was speaking. I was like one asleep at a foolish lecture, who 
hears in dreams, and only wakes when the prosing stops. Was 
it not prosing? What was it to me what they said ? They 
eould not understand me — my motives — my excuses ; the 
whole pleading, on my side as well as the crown’s, seemed 
one huge fallacy — beside the matter altogether — never touch- 
ing the real point at issue, the eternal moral equity of my 
deeds or misdeeds. I had no doubt that it would all be con- 
ducted quite properly, and fairly, and according to the forms 
of law ; but what was law to me ? I wanted justice. And 
so 1 let them go on their own way, conscious of but one 
thought — was Lillian in the court ? 

I dared not look and see. I dared not lift up my eyes to- 
ward the gaudy rows of ladies who had crowded to the “ in- 
teresting trial of the D rioters.” The torture of anxiety 

was less than that of certainty might be, and I kept my eyes 
down, and wondered how on earth the attorneys had found in 
so simple a case enough to stuff' those great blue bags. 

When, however, any thing did seem likely to touch on a 
reality, I woke up forthwith, in spite of myself. I recollect 
well, for instance, a squabble about challenging the jurymen; 
and my counsel’s voice of pious indignation, as ho asked, 
“ Do you call these agricultural gentlemen and farmers, how- 
ever excellent and respectable — on which point Heaven for- 
bid that I, &c., &c. — the prisoner’s ‘pares,’ peers, equals, or 
likes ? What single interest, opinion, or motive have th*ey in 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 2^63 

Eomrnon, but the universal one of self-interest, which, in this 
case, happens to pull in exactly opposite directions ? Your 
lordship has often animadverted fully and boldly on the prac- 
tice of allowing a bench of squires to sit in judgment on a 
poacher; surely it is quite as unjust that agricultural rioters 
should be tried by a jury of the very class against whom they 
are accused of rebelling.” 

“Perhaps my learned brother would like a jury of rioters 
suggested some queen’s counsel. 

“Upon my word, then, it would be much the fairer plan.” 

I wondered whether he would have dared to say as much 
in the street outside— and relapsed into indifierence.' I believe 
there Avas some long delay, and wrangling about law-quibbles, 
which seemed likely at one time to quash the wdiole prosecu- 
tion ; but I was rather glad than sorry to find that it had 
been overruled. It was all a play, a game of bowls — the 
bowls happening to be human heads — got up between the 
law'yers, lor the edification of society ; and it would have been 
a pity not to play it out according to the rules and regulations 
thereof. 

As for the evidence, its tenor may be easily supposed from 
my story. There were those who could swear to my language 
at the camp. I was seen accompanying the mob to the farm, 
and haranguing them. The noise was too great for the wit- 
nesses to hear all I said, but they were certain I talked about 
the sacred name of liberty. The farmer’s wife had seen me 
run round to the stacks when they were fired — whether just 
before or just after, she never mentioned. She had seen me 
running up and down in front of the house, talking loudly, and 
gesticulating violently ; she saw me, too, struggling with an- 
other rioter for her husband’s desk ; — and the rest of the wit- 
nesses, some of whom I am certain I had seen busy plun- 
dering, though they w’^cre ready to swear that they had been 
merely accidental passers-by, seemed to think that they proved 
their own innocence, and testified their pious indignation by 
avoiding carefully any fact wdiich could excuse me. But, 
somehow, my counsel thought difierently ; and cross-examined, 
and bullied, and tormented, and misstated — as he was bound 
to do ; and so one witness after another, clumsy and cowardly 
enough already, was driven by his engines of torture, as if by 
a pitiless spell, to deny half that he had deposed truly, and 
confess a great deal that was utterly false — till confusion be- 
came worse confounded, and there seemed no truth anywhere, 
and no falsehood either, and “ naught was every thing, and 


1>64 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


every thing was naught till I began to have doubts whetiier 
the riot had ever oeeurred at all — and, indeed, doubts of my 
own identity also, when I had heard the counsel for the crown 
impute to me, personally, as in duty bound, every seditious 
atrocity which had been committed either in England or France 
since 1793. To him, certainly, I did listen tolerably; it was 
“ as good as a play.” Atheism, blasphemy, vitriol-throwing, and 
community of women were among my lighter oflenses — for 
had I not actually been engaged in a plot for the destruction 
of property ? How did the court know that I had not spent 
the night before the riot, as “ the doctor” and his friends did 
before the riots of 1839, in drawing lots for the estates of the 
surrounding gentlemen, wi^h my deluded dupes and victims ? 
— for of course 1, and not want of work, had deluded them 
into rioting; at least, they never would have known that they 
were starving, if 1 had not stirred up their evil passions by 
daring to inform them of that otherwise impalpable fact. I, 
the only Chartist there 1 Might there not have been dozens 
of them ? — emissaries from London, dressed up as starving 
laborers, and rheumatic old women ? There were actually 
traces of a plan for seizing all the ladies in the country, and 

setting up a seraglio of them in D Cathedral. How did 

the court know that there was not one ? 

Ay, how indeed ? and how did I know either ? I really 
began to question whether the man might not be right after 
all. The whole theory seemed so horribly coherent — possible 
— natural. I might have done it, under possession of the 
dcwil, and forgotten it in excitement — I might — perhaps I did. 
And if there, why not elsewhere ? Perhaps I had helped 
Jourdan Coupe-tete at Lyons, and been king of 1>lie Munster 
Anabaptists — why not % What matter ? When would this 
eternity of wigs, and bonnets, and glaring windows, and ear- 
grinding prate and jargon, as of a diabolic universe of street- 
organs, end — end — end — and I get quietly hanged, and done 
with it all forever ? 

Oh, the horrible length of that day ! It seemed to me as 
if I had been always on my trial, ever since I was born. I 
wondered at times how many years ago it had all begun. I 
felt what a far stronger and more single-hearted patriot than 
I, poor Somerville, says of himself under the torture of the 
sergeant’s cat, in a passage, whose horrible simplicity and un- 
conscious pathos have haunted me ever since I read it ; how, 
when only fifty out of his hundred lashes had fallen on the 
bleeding back, “ The time since they began vxis like a long 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


265 


period of life : I felt as if I had lived all the time oj my 
real life in torture, and that the days ivhen existence had u 
pleasure in it were a dream long, lo7ig gone by^ 

The reader may begin to suspect that I was fast going 
mad ; and I believe I was. If he has followed my story with 
a human heart, he may excuse me of any extreme weakness, 
if I did at moments totter on the verge of that abyss. 

What saved me, I believe now, was the keen, bright look 
of love and confidence which flashed on me from Crossthwaite’s 
glittering eyes, when he was called forward as a witness to 
my character. He spoke out like a man, 1 hear, that day. 
But the counsel for the crown tried to silence him triumphant- 
ly, by calling on him to confess himself a Chartist ; as if a 
man must needs be a liar and a villain because he holds cer- 
tain opinions about the franchise ! However, that was, I 
heard, the general opinion of the court. And then Crossth- 
waite lost his temper, and called the queen’s counsel a hired 
bully, and so w'ent down ; having done, as I was told aftei- 
ward, no good to me. 

And then there followed a passage of tongue-fence between 
Mackaye and some barrister, and great laughter at the barris- 
ter’s expense : and then I heard the old man’s voice rise 
thin and clear : 

“ Let him that is without sin amang ye, cast the first 
stane !” 

And as he went down he looked at me — a look full of de- 
spair. I never had had a ray of hope from the beginning ; but 
now I began to think whether men suffered much when they 
wem hung, and whether one woke at once into the next life, 
or had to wait till the body had returned to the dust, and 
watch tlie ugly process of one’s own decay. I was not afraid 
of death — 1 never experienced that sensation. I am not 
physicfdly brave. I am as thoroughly afraid of pain as any 
child can be ; but that next world has never offered any pros- 
pect to me, save boundless food for my insatiable curiosity. 

But at that moment my attorney thrust into my hand a 
little dirty scrap of paper. “ Do you know this man!” 

I read it. 

»SiR — I wull tell all truthe. Mr. Lock is a murdered 
man if he be handed. Lev me spek out, for love of the Lord 

“ J. Davis.” 

- No. I never had heard of him ; and I let the paper fall 

M 


266 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

A murdered man ? I had known that all along. Had 
not the queen’s counsel been trying all day to murder me, as 
was their duty, seeing that they got their living thereby 1 

A few moments after a laboring man was in the witness- 
box ; and, to my astonishment, telling the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth. 

I will not trouble the reader with his details, for they were 
simply and exactly what I have already stated. He was bad- 
gered, bullied, cross-examined, but nothing could shake him. 
With that dogged honesty and laconic dignity, which is the 
good side of the English peasant’s character, he stood manfully 
to his assertion — that I had done every thing that words or 
actions could do to prevent violence, even to the danger of my 
own personal safety. He swore to the words which I used 
when trying to wrest the desk from the man who had stolen 
it ; and when the queen’s counsel asked him tauntingly, who 
liad set him on bringing his new story there at the eleventh 
hour, he answered, equally to the astonishment of his ques- 
tioner and of me. 

“ Muster Locke hisself.” 

“What! the prisoner?” almost screamed the counselor, 
who fancied, I suppose, that he had stumbled on a confession 
of unblushing bribery. 

“ Yes, he ; he there. As he M^ent up over hill to meeting 
he met my two boys a shep-minding ; and, because the cutter 
was froze, he stop and turn the handle for ’em for a matter 
of ten minutes; and I was coming up over field, and says I, 
I’ll hear what that chap’s got to say — there can’t be no harm 
in going up arter the likes of he ; for, says I to myself, a man 
can’t have got any great wickedness a plotting in he’s head, 
wdien he’ll stop a ten minutes to help two boys as he never 
sot eyes on afore in his life ; and I think their honors ’ll say 
the same.” 

Whether my reader will agree or not with the w'orthy fel- 
low, my counsel, I need not say, did, and made full use of his 
hint. All the previous evidence w^as now discovered to have 
corroborated the last witness, except where it had been no- 
toriously overthrown. I w^as extolled as a miracle of calm 
benevolence ; and black became gray, and gray became spot- 
less white, and the wdiole feeling of the court seemed changed 
in my favor ; till the little attorney popped up his head and 
whispered to me : 

“ By George ! that last witness has saved y^ur life.” 

To which I answered “ Very well ’ — and turned stupidly 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 267 

back upon that nightmare thought — was Lillian in the 
court ? 

At last a voice, the judge’s, I believe, for it was grave, 
gentle, almost compassionate, asked us one by one whether 
we had any thing to say in our own defense. I recollect an 
indistinct murmur from one after another of the poor semi- 
brutes on my left ; and then my attorney, looking up to me, 
made me aware that I was expected to speak. On the mo- 
ment, somehow, my whole courage returned to me. I felt 
that I must unburden my heart, now or never. With a sud- 
den effort I roused myself, and looking fixedly and proudly at 
the reverend face opposite, began : 

“ The utmost oflense which has been proved against me is 
a few bold words, producing consequences as unexpected as 
illogical. If the stupid ferocity with which my words were 
misunderstood, as by a horde of savages, rather than English- 
men ; if the moral and physical condition of these prisoners 
at my side; of those witnesses who have borne testimony 
against me, miserable white slaves, miscalled free laborers ; 
ay, if a single walk through the farms and cottages on which 
this mischief was bred, affords no excuse for one indignant 
sentence — ” 

There she was ! There she had been all the time — right 
opposite to me, close to the judge — cold, bright, curious — 
smiling ! And as our eyes met, she turned away, and whis- 
pered gayly something to a young man who sat beside her. 

Every drop of blood in my body rushed into my forehead ; 
the court, the windows, and the faces, whirled round and 
round, and I fell senseless on the floor of the dock. 

1 next recollect some room or other in the jail, Mackayo 
with both my hands in his; and the rough kindly voice of 
the jailer congratulating me on having “ only got three years.” 

“But you didn’t show half a good pluck,” said some one. 
“ There’s two on ’em transported, took it as bold a« brass, 
and thanked the judge for getting ’em out o’ this starving 
place ‘free gracious for nothing,’ says they.” 

“Ah !” quoth the little attorney, rubbing his hands, “you 

should have seen and after the row in ’42 ! They 

were the boys lor the Bull Ring ! Gave a barrister as good 
as he brought, eh, Mr. Mackaye I My small services, you 
remember, were of no use — really no use at all — quite asham- 
ed to send in my little account. Managed the case them- 


.268 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


selves, like two patriotic parties as they were, with a degree 
of tbrensic acuteness, inspired hy the consciousness of a noble 
cause — Ahem ! You remember, friend M. ? Grand tri- 
umphs those, eh ?” 

“ Ay,” said Sandy, “ I mind them unco weel — they cost 
me a' my few savings, mair by token ; an’ mony a braw fal- 
low paid for ither folks’ sins that tide. But my puir laddie 
here’s no made o’ that stuff. He’s ower thin-skinned for a 
patriot.” 

“ Ah, well — this little taste of British justice will thicken 
his hide for him, eh ?” and the attorney chuckled and wink- 
sd. “ He’ll come out again as tough as a bull-dog, and as 
surly too. Eh, Mr. Mackaye ? eh ?” 

“ ’Deed, then, I’m unco sair afeard that your opeenion is 
no a’thegither that improbable,” answered Sandy, with a 
jrawl of unusual solemnity. 


CHAPTER XXX. 


PRISON THOUGHTS. 

I WAS alone in my cell. 

Three years’ imprisonment ! Thirty-six months ! one thou 
sand and ninety-five days — and twenty-four whole hours in 
each of them 1 Well — I should sleep half the time : one- 
third at least. Perhaps I should not be able to sleep ! To 
lie awake, and think — there ! The thought was horrible — it 
was all horrible. To have three whole years cut out of my 
life, instead of having before me, as I had always as yet had, 
a mysterious Eldorado of new schemes and hopes, possible 
developments, possible triumphs, possible bliss — to have noth- 
ing before me but blank and stagnation, dead loss and waste : 
and then to go out again, and start once more where I had 
left off yesterday ! 

It should not be ! I would not lose these years I I would 
show myself a man ; they should feel my strength just when 
they fancied they had crushed me utterly I They might bury 
me, but I should rise again ! I should rise again more glori- 
ous, perhaps to be henceforth immortal, and live upon the 
lips of men. I would educate myself; I would read — what 
would I not read ? These three years should be a time of N 
sacred retirement and contemplation, as of Thebaid Anchor- 
ite, or Mahomet in his Arabian cave. I would write pam- 
phlets that should thunder through the land, and make tyrants 
tremble on their thrones ! All England — at least all crushed 
and suflering hearts, should break forth at my fiery words into 
one roar of indignant sympathy. No — I would write a 
poem ; I would concentrate all my experience, my aspirations, 
all the hopes and wrongs and sorrows of the poor, into one 
garland of thorns — one immortal epic of suffering. What 
should I call it? And I set to work deliberately — such a 
thing is man — to think of a title. 

I looked up, and my eye caught the close bars of the little 
window; and then came over me, for the first time, the full 
meaning of that word — Prison ; that word which the rich use 
so lightly, knowing well that there is no chance, in these days, 
of their ever finding themselves in one ; lor the higher classes 
never break the laws — seeing that they have made them to 
fit themselves. Ay, I was in prison. I could not go out or 


270 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


come in at will. I was watched, commanded at every turn 
1 was a brute animal, a puppet, a doll, that children put 
away in a cupboard, and there it lies. And yet my whole 
soul was as wide, fierce, roving, struggling, as ever. Horrible 
contradiction ! The dreadful sense of helplessness, the crush- 
ing weight of necessity, seemed to choke me. The smooth 
white walls, the smooth white ceiling, seemed squeezing in 
closer and closer on me, and yet dilating into vast inane in- 
finities, just as the merest knot of mould will transform itself, 
as one watches it, and nothing else, into enormous clifls, long 
slopes of moor, and spurs of mountain-range. Oh, those 
smooth white walls and ceiling ! If there had but been a 
print — a stain of dirt — a cobweb, to fleck their unbroken 
ghastliness ! They stared at me, like grim, impassive, feature- 
less, formless fiends ; all the more dreadful for their sleek 
hypocritic cleanliness — purity as of a saint-inquisitor watch- 
ing with spotless conscience the victim on the rack. They 
choked me — I gasped for breath, stretched out my arms, 
rolled shrieking on the floor — the narrowed checkered glimpse 
of free blue sky, seen through the window, seemed to fade 
dimmer and dimmer, farther and farther off. I sprang up as 
if to follow it — rushed to the bars, shook and wrenched at 
them with my thin, puny arms — and stood spell-bound, as I 
caught sight of the cathedral towers, standing out in grand 
repose against the horizontal fiery bars of sunset, like great 
angels at the gates of Paradise, watching in stately sorrow all 
the wailing and the wrong below. And beneath, beneath — 
the well-known roofs — Lillian’s home, and all its proud and 
happy memories I It was but a corner of a gable, a scrap of 
garden, that I could see beyond intervening roofs and trees — 
but could I mistake them ? There was the very cedar-tree ; 
I knew its dark pyramid but too well ! There I had walked by 
her ; there, just behind that envious group of chestnuts, she 
was now. The light was fading ; it must be six o’clock ; she 
must be in her room now, dressing herself for dinner, looking 
so beautiful ! And as I gazed, and gazed, all the intervening 
objects became transparent, and vanished before the intens- 
ity of my imagination. Were my poems in her rooms still? 
Perhaps she had thrown them away — the condemned rioter’s 
poems! Was she thinking of me ? Yes — with horror and 
contempt. Well, at least she was thinking of me. And she 
would understand me at last — she must. Some day she 
would know all I had borne for love of her — the deptfi, the 
might, the purity of my adoration. She would see the world 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


271 


he noring me, in the day of my triumph, when I was appre- 
ciated at last ; wdien I stood before the eyes of admiring men, 
a people’s singer, a king of human spirits, great with the rank 
which genius gives, then she would find out what a man had 
loved her ; then she would know the honor, the privilege of a 
poet’s worship. 

— But that trial scene ! 

Ay — that trial scene. That cold, unmoved smile ! — when 
she knew me, must have known me, not to be the wretch 
which those hired slanderers had called me. If she had cared 
for me — if she had a woman’s heart in her at all, any pity, 
any justice, would she not have spoken ? Would she not 
have called on others to speak, and clear me of the calumny? 
Nonsense ! Impossible ! She — so frail, tender, retiring — how 
could she speak ? How did I know that she had not felt for 
me ? It was woman’s nature — duty, to conceal her feelings; 
perhaps that after all was the true explanation of that smile 
Perhaps, too, she might have spoken — might be even now 
pleading for me in secret ; not that I wished to be pardoned — 
not I — but it would be so delicious to have her, her, pleading 
for me ! Perhaps — perhaps I might hear of her — from her I 
Surely she could not leave me here so close, without some 
token ! And I actually listened, I know not how long, ex- 
pecting the door to open, and a message to arrive : till, with 
my eyes riveted on that bit of gable, and my ears listening 
behind me like a hare’s in her form, to catch every sound in 
the ward outside, I fell fast asleep, and forgot all in the 
heavy dreamless torpor of utter mental and bodily exhaustion. 

I was awakened by the opening of my cell door, and the 
appearance of the turnkey. 

“Well, young man, all right again? You’ve had a long 
nap ; and no wonder, you’ve had a hard time of it lately ; 
and a good lesson to you, too.” 

“How long have I slept ? I do not recollect going to bed. 
And how came I to lie down without undressing ?” 

“I found you at lock-up hours, asleep there, kneeling on the 
chair, with your head on the window-sill ; and a mercy you 
hadn’t tumbled ofl' and broke your back. Now, look here. 
You seems a civil sort of chap ; and civil gets as civil gives 
with me. Only don’t you talk no politics. They ain’t no 
good to nobody, except the big ’uns, wot gets their living 
thereby ; and I should think you'd had dose enough on ’em 
to last fbr a month of Sundays. So just get yourself tidy, 
there’s a lad, and come along with me to chapel.” 


272 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


I obeyed him, in that and other things ; and I never receh d 
from him, or, indeed, from any one else there, aught but kind- 
ness. I have no complaint to make — but pri.son is prison. 
As for talking politics, I never, during those three years, ex- 
changed as many sentences with any of my fellow-prisoners 
What had I to say to them ? Poachers and petty thieves — 
the scum of misery, ignorance, and rascality throughout the 
country. If my heart yearned toward them at times, it was 
generally shut close by the exclusiv’^e pride of superior intellect 
and knowledge. I considered it, as it w'as, a degradation tc 
be classed with such ; never asking myself how far I had 
brought that degradation on myself : and I loved to show my 
sense of injustice by walking, moody and silent, up and down 
a lonely corner of the yard ; and at last contrived, under the 
plea of ill-health (and, truly, I never was ten minutes without 
coughing), to confine myself entirely to my cell, and escape 
altogether the company of a class whom I despised, almost 
hated, as my betrayers, before whom I had cast away my 
pearls — questionable though they were, according to Mackaye. 
Oh ! there is, in the intellectual workman’s heart, as in all 
others, the root of Pharisaism — the lust after self-glorifying 
superiority, on the ground of “genius.” We too are men ; 
frail, selfish, proud as others. The days are past, thank God, 
when the “ gentlemen button makers” used to insist on a 
separate tap-room from the mere “ button-makers,” on the 
ground of earning a few more shillings per week. But we 
are not yet thorough democrats, my brothers ; we do not yet 
utterly believe our own loud doctrine of equality ; nor shall 
we till — But I must not anticipate the stages of my own 
experience. 

I complain of no one, again I say — neither of judge, jury, 
jailers, or chaplain. True, imprisonment was the worst pos- 
sible remedy for my disease that could have been devised, if, 
as the new doctrine is, punishments are inflicted only to 
reform the criminal. What could prison do for me, but 
embitter and confirm all my prejudices? But I do not see 
what else they could have done wdth me while law is what 
zt is. And perhaps ever will be ; dealing with the overt acts 
of the poor, and never touching the subtler and more spiritual 
iniquities of the rich respectable. When shall we see a nation 
ruled, not by the law, but by the Gospel ; not in the letter 
which kills, but in the spirit which is love, forgiveness, life 1 
When ? God knows ! And God does know. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 273 

But I did work, during those three years, for months at a 
time, steadily and severely ; and, with little profit, alas ! to 
my temper of mind. I gorged my intellect, for I could do 
nothing else. The political questions which I longed to solve 
in some way or other, were tabooed by the well meaning 
chaplain. He even forbade me a standard English work on 
political economy, Avhich I had written to Mackaye to borrow 
lor me ; he was not so careful, it will be seen hereafter, with 
Ibreign books. He meant, of course, to keep my mind from 
what he considered at once useless and polluting ; but tht 
only effect of his method was, that all the doubts and ques- 
tions remained, rankling and fierce, imperiously demanding 
my attention, and had to be solved by my own moody and 
soured meditations, warped and colored by the strong sense 
of universal wrong. 

Then he deluged me with tracts, weak and well-meaning, 
which informed me that “ Christians,” being “ not of this 
world,” had nothing to do with politics ; and preached to me 
the divine right of kings, passive obedience to the powers — or 
impotences — that be, &c., &c., with such success as may 
be imagined. I opened them each, read a few sentences, and 
laid them by. “ They were written by good men, no doubt : 
but men who had an interest in keeping up the present 
system at all events, by men who knew nothing of my 
temptations, my creed, my unbelief; who saw all heaven and 
earth from a station antipodal to my own : I had simply 
nothing to do with them. 

And yet, excellent man ! pious, benignant, compassionate I 
God forbid that I should, in writing these words, allow myself 
a desire so base as that of disparaging thee ! However thy 
words failed of their purpose, that bright, gentle, earnest face 
never appeared without bringing balm to the wounded spirit. 
Hadst thou not recalled me to humanity, those three years 
would have made a savage and a madman of me. May God 
reward thee hereafter I Thou hast thy reward on earth in 
the gratitude of many a broken heart bound up, of drunkards 
sobered, thieves reclaimed, and outcasts taught to look for a 
paternal home denied them here on earth ! While such thy 
deeds, what matter thine opinions ? 

But alas ! (for the truth must be told, as a warning to 
those who have to face the educated working-men), his opin- 
ions did matter to himself The good man labored under the 
delusion, common enough, of choosing his favorite weapons 
from his weakest faculty ; and the \Try inferiority of his 


9 


274 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


intellect prevented him from seeing where his true strength 
lay. He icould argue ; he would try and convert me from 
skepticism by what seemed to him reasoning, the common fig- 
ure of which was, what logicians, I believe, call begging the 
question ; and the common method what they call ignoratio 
eleiichi — shooting at pigeons, while crows are the game desired. 
He always started by demanding my assent to the very ques- 
tion which lay at the bottom of my doubts. He would 
v/rangle and wrestle blindly up and down, with tears of 
earnestness in his eyes, till he had lost his temper, as far as 
was possible for one so angel-guarded as he seemed to be ; 
and then, when he found himself confused, contradicting his 
own words, making concessions at which he shuddered, for 
the sake of gaining from me assents which he found out the 
next moment I understood in quite a different sense from his, 
he would suddenly shift his ground, and try to knock me down 
authoritatively with a single text of Scripture ; when all the 
while I wanted proof that Scripture had any authority at all. 

He carefully confined himself, too, throughout, to the dog- 
matic phraseology of the pulpit; while I either did not under- 
stand, or required justification for the strange, far-fetched, 
technical meanings, which he attached to his expressions. If 
he would only have talked English ! if clergymen would only 
preach in English ! and then they wonder that their sermons 
liave no effect! Their notion seems to be, as my good chap- 
lain’s was, that the teacher is not to condescend to the 
scholar, much less to become all things to all men, if by any 
means he may save some ; but that he has a right to demand 
that the scholar shall ascend to him before he is taught ; that 
he shall raise himself up of his own strength into the teacher’s 
region of thought as well as feeling; to do for himself, in short 
under penalty of being called an unbeliever, just what the 
teacher professes to do for him. 

At last, he seemed dimly to discover that I could not ac- 
quiesce in his conclusions, while I denied his premises ; and so 
he lent me, in an ill-starred moment, “ Paley’s Evidences,” 
and some tracts of the last generation against Deism. I read 
them, and remained, as hundreds more have done, just where 
i was before. 

“ Was Paley,” I asked, “ a really good and pious man ?” 

The really good and pious man hemmed and hawed. 

“ Because, if he was not, I can’t trust a page of his special 
pleading, let it look as clever as the whole Old Bailey in 
one.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


275 


Besides, I never denied the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, 
or liis apostles. I doubted the myths and doctrines, which J 
believed to have been gradually built up round the true story. 
The fact was, he was, like most of his class,. “ attacking ex- 
tinct Satans,” fighting manfully against Voltaire, Volney, and 
Tom Paine ; wh.le I was fighting for Strauss, Hennell, and 
Emerson. And, at last, he gave me up for some weeks as a 
hopeless infidel, without ever having touched the points on 
which I disbelieved. He had never read Strauss — hardly 
even heard of him ; and, till clergymen make up their minds 
to do that, and to answer Strauss also, they will as he did, 
leave the heretic artisan just where they found him. 

The bad efiect which all this had upon my mind may 
easily be conceived. I felt myself his intellectual superior. 
I tripped him up, played with him, made him expose his 
weaknesses, till I really began to despise him May Heaven 
forgive me for it,! But it was not till long afterward that T 
began, on looking back, to see how worthless was any superior 
cleverness of mine before his superior moral and spiritual 
excellence. That was just what he would not let me see 
at the time. I was worshiping intellect, mere intellect ; and 
thence arose my doubts ; and he tried to conquer them by 
exciting the very faculty which had begotten them. When 
will the clergy learn that their strength is in action, and not 
in argument 1 If they are to re-convert the masses, it must 
be by noble deeds, as Carlyle says ; “ not by noisy, theoretic 
laudation of a Church, but by silent practical demonstration 
of the Church.” 

But, the reader may ask. Where was your Bible all this 
time ? 

Yes — there was a Bible in my cell — and the chaplain read 
to me, both privately and in chapel, such portions of it as he 
thought suited my case, or rather his utterly mistaken view 
thereof. But to tell the truth, I cared not to read or listen. 
Was it not the book of the aristocrats — of kings and priests, pas- 
sive obedience, and the slavery of the intellect ? Had I been 
thrown under the infiuence of the more educated Independents 
in former years, I might have thought differently. They, at 
least, have contrived, with what logical consistence, I know 
not, to reconcile orthodox Christianity with unflincbing 
democratic opinions. But such was not my lot. My 
mother, as I said in my first chapter, had become a Baptist ; 
because she believed lhat sect, and as I think rightly, to be 


276 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


the only one which logically and consistently carries out the 
Calvinistic theory ; and now I looked back upon her delight 
in Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jehu, only as the mystic 
application of rare exceptions to the fanaticism of a chosen 
few — the elect — the saints, who, as the fifth- monarchy men 
held, were one day lo rule the world with a rod of iron. And 
so I fell — willingly, alas ! into the vulgar belief about the 
politics of Scripture, common alike — strange unanimity! — to 
Infidel and Churchman. The great idea that the Bible is 
the history of mankind’s deliverance from all tyranny, out- 
ward as well as inward , of the Jews, as the one free con- 
stitutional people among a world of slaves and tyrants ; of 
their ruin, as the righteous fruit of a voluntary return to 
despotism ; of the New Testament, as the good news that 
freedom, brotherhood, and equality, once confined only to 
Judea and to Greece, and dimly seen even there, was hence- 
forth to be the right of all mankind, the law of all society — 
who was there to tell me that ? AVho is there now to go 
forth and tell it to the millions who have suffered, and doubt- 
ed, and despaired like me, and turn the hearts of the dis- 
obedient to the wisdom of the just, before the great and ter- 
rible day of the Lord come ? Again I ask — who will go forth 
and preach that Gospel, and save his native land 1 

But, as I said before, I read, and steadily. In the first 
place, I, for the first time in my life, studied Shakspeare 
throughout ; and found out now the treasure which I had 
overlooked, I assure my readers I am not going to give a 
lecture on him here, as 1 was minded to have done. Only, 
as I am asking questions, who will write us a “People’s Com- 
mentary on Shakspeare ?” 

Then 1 waded, making copious notes and extracts, through 
the whole of Hume, and Hallam’s “ Middle Ages” and “ Con- 
stitutional History,” and found them barren to my soul. When 
(to ask a third and last question) will some man, of the spirit 
of Carlyle — one vdio is not ashamed to acknowledge the in- 
tervention of a God, a Providence, even of a devil, in the 
affairs of men — arise, and write a “ People’s History of En- 
gland 

Then I labored long months at learning French, for the 
mere purpose of reading French political economy after my 
liberation. But at last iff my impatience, I wrote to Sandy 
to send me Proudhon and Louis Blanc, on the chance of their 
passing the good chaplain’s censorship — and behold, they pass* 
ed ! He had never heard their names ! He was, I suspect 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND -POET. 


277 


utterly ignorant of French, and afraid of exposing his ignorance 
by venturing to criticise. As it was, I Avas allowed peaceable 
possession of them till within a few months of my liberation, 
with such consequences as may be imagined ; and then, to 
his unfeigned terror and horror, he discovered, in some period- 
ical, that he had been leaving in my hands books which ad- 
vocated “ the destruction of properly,” and therefore, in his 
eyes, of all which is moral or sacred in earth and heaven ! I 
gave them up* without a struggle, so really painful was the 
good soul’s concern, and the reproaches which he heaped, not 
on me — he never reproached me in his life — but on himself, 
for having so neglected his duty. 

Then I read hard for a few months at physical science — at 
Zoology and Botany, and threw it aside again in bitterness of 
heart. It was too bitter to be tantalized with the description 
of Nature’s wondrous forms, and I there a prisoner, between 
those four white walls ! 

Then I set to work to write an autobiography — at least to 
commit to paper in regular order the most striking incidents 
and conversations which I could recollect, and which I had 
noted down, as they occurred, in my diary. From that source 
I have drawn nearly the whole of my history up to this point. 
For the rest I must trust to memory — and, indeed, the strange 
deeds and sufferings, and yet stranger revelations, of the last 
few months, have branded themselves deep enough upon my 
brain. I need not hope, or fear, that aught of them should 
slip my memory. 

So went the weary time. Week after week, month after 
month, summer after summer, I scored the days off, like a 
lonely schoolboy, on the pages of a calendar ; and day by day 
I went to my window, and knelt there, gazing at the gable 
and the cedar-tree. That was my only recreation. Some- 
times, at first, my eyes used to wander over the wide prospect 
of rich lowlands, and farms, and hamlets, and I used to amuse 
myself with conjectures about the people who lived in them, 
and walked where they liked on God’s earth : but soon 1 
hated to look at the country ; its perpetual change and pro- 
gress mocked the dreary sameness of my dungeon. It was 
bitter, maddening, to see the gray boughs grow green with 
leaves, and the green fade to autumnal yellow, and the gray 
boughs reappear again, and I still there ! The dark, sleeping 
fallows bloomed with emerald blades of corn, and then the 
corn grew deep and crisp, and blackened before the summer 


278 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


breeze, in “ waves of shadow,” as Mr. Tennyson says in one 
of his most exquisite lyrics; and then the fields grew white to 
harvest day by day, and I saw the rows of sheaves rise one 
by one, and the carts crawling homeward under their load. I 
could almost hear the merry voices of the children round them 
— children that could go into the woods, and pick wild flow'ers, 
and I still there ! No — I would look at nothing but the gable, 
and the cedar-tree, and the tall cathedral towers ; there was 
no change in them — they did not laugh at me. 

But she w’ho lived beneath them'? Months and seasons 
crawled along, and yet no sign or hint of her ! I was forgot- 
ten, forsaken ! And yet I gazed, and gazed. I could not 
forget her ; I could not forget what she had been to me. 
Eden was still there, though I was shut out from it forever : 
and so, like a widower over the grave of her he loves, morn- 
ing and evening I watched the gable and the cedar-tree. ^ 

And my cousin ? Ah, that was the thought, the only 
thought, which made my life intolerable ! What might he 
not be doing in the mean time] I knew his purpose — 1 knew 
his power. True, I had never seen a hint, a glancj, which 
could have given him hope ; but he had three whole years to 
win her in — three whole years, and I fettered, helpless, absent! 
“ Fool ! could I have won her if I had been free ? At least, 
I would have tried : we would have fought it fairly out, on 
even ground ; we would have seen which was the strongest, 
respectability and cunning, or the simplicity of genius. But 
now !” — And I tore at the bars of the windovr, and threw 
myself on the floor of mv cell, and longed to die. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 


THE NEW CHURCH. 

In a poor subui b of the city, which I could see well enough 
from my little window, a new Gothic church was building. 
When I first took up my abode in the cell, it was just begun 
— the walls had hardly risen above the neighboring sheds and 
garden-fences. But month after month I had watched it 
growing ; I had seen one window after another filled with 
tracery, one buttress after another finished ofT with its carved 
pinnacle ; then I had watched the skeleton of the roof gradu- 
ally clothed in tiling ; and then the glazing of the windows — 
some of them painted, I could see, from the iron network 
which was placed outside them the same day. Then the 
doors were put up — were they going to finish that hand.some 
tower? No ; it was left with its wooden cap, I suppose for 
further funds. But the nave, and the deep chancel behind 
it, were all finished, and surmounted by a cross — and beauti- 
ful enough the little sanctuary looked, in the virgin-purity of 
its spotless freestone. For eighteen months I watched it 
grow before my eyes — and I was still in my cell ! 

And then there was a grand procession of surplices and 
lawn sleeves ; and among them I fancied I distinguished the 
old dean’s stately figure, and turned my head away, and look- 
ed again, and fancied I distinguished another figure — it must 
have been mere imagination — the distance was far too great 
lor me to identify any one; but I could not get out of my 
head the fancy — say rather, the instinct — that it was my 
cou.siu’s; and that it was my cousin whom I saw daily after 
that, coming out and going in, when the bell rang to morning 
and evening prayers — for there were daily services there, and 
saints’ day services, and Lent services, and three services on 
a Sunday, and six or seven on Good Friday and Easter-day. 
The little musical bell above the chancel-arch seemed always 
ringing ; and still that figure haunted me like a nightmare, 
ever coming in and going out about its priestly calling — and 
I still in my cell ! If it should be he ! so close to her ! I 
shuddered at the thought; and, just because it was so intoler- 
able, it clung to me, and tormented me, and kept me awake 
at nights, till T became utterly unable to study quietly, and 


280 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


spent hours at the narrow window, watching for the very fig 
lire which I loathed to see. 

And then a Gothic school-house rose at the church-yard 
end, and troops of children poured in and out. and women 
came daily for alms ; and when the frosts came on, every 
morning I saw a crowd, and soup carried away in pitchers, 
and clothes and blankets given away' the giving seemed 
endless, boundless ; and I thought of the times of the Roman 
Empire and the “ sportula,” when the poor had got to live 
upon the alms of the rich, more and more, year by year — till 
they devoured their own devourers, and the end came ; and 
I shuddered. • And yet it was a pleasant sight, as every new 
church is to the healthy-minded man, let his religious opinions 
be what they may. A fresh centre of civilization, mercy, 
ccmfort for weary hearts, relief from frost and hunger; a 
fre&h centre of instruction, humanizing, disciplining, however 
meagre in my eyes, two hundreds of little savage spirits ; 
altogether a pleasant sight, even to me there in my cell. 
And I used to wonder at the wasted power of the Church — 
her almost entire monopoly of the pulpits, the schools, the 
alms of England ; and then thank Heaven, somewhat prema- 
turely, that she knew and used so little her vast latent power 
for the destruction of liberty. 

Or for its realization ? 

Ay, that is the question ! We shall not see it .solved — at 
least, I never shall. 

But still that figure haunted me ; all through that winter 
I saw it, chatting with old women, patting children’s heads, 
walking to the church with ladies ; sometimes with a tiny, 
tripping figure. I did not dare to let myself fancy who that 
might be. 

December passed, and January came. I had now only two 
months more before my deliverance. One day I seemed to 
myself to have spent a whole life in that narrow room ; and 
the next, the years and months seemed short and blank as a 
night’s sleep on waking; and there was no salient point in 
all my memory, since that last sight of Lillian’s smile, and 
the faces and the windows whirling round before me as I fell. 

At last came a letter from Mackaye. “ Ye speired for 
news o’ your cousin — an’ I find he’s a nceber o’ y^ours ; ca’d 
to a new kirk i’ the city o’ your captivity — an’ na stickit min* 
ister he makes, forbye he’s ane o’ these new Puseyite secta- 
rians, to judge by your uncle’s report. I met the auld baillie 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


281 


bodic on the street, an’ I was gaun to pass him by, but he 
was sae fu’ o’ good news he could na hut stop an’ ha* a crack 
wi’ me on politics ; for we ha’ helpit thegither in certain 
municipal clanjamfreics o’ late. An’ he told me your cousin 
wins honor fast, an’ mun surely die a bishop — puir bairn 
An’ besides that, he’s gaun be married the spring. I dinna 
mind the leddy’s name ; but there’s tocher wi’ lass o’ his, I’ll 
warrant. He’s na laird o’ Cockpen, foi a penniless lass wi' 
a long pedigree.” 

As I sat meditating over this news — which made the tor- 
ment of suspicion and suspense more intolerable than ever — 
behold a postscript, added some two days after. 

“Oh! oh! Sic news! gran’ news! news to make baith 
the ears o’ him that heareth it to tingle. God is God, an’ no 
the deevil after a’ ! Louis Philippe is doun ! — doun, doun, 
like a dog ! an’ the republic’s proclaimed, an’ the auld villain 
here in England, they say, a wanderer an’ a beggar. I ha’ 
sent ye the paper o’ the day. PS. — 73, 37, 12. Oh, the 
Psalms are full o’t ! Never say the Bible’s no true, mair 
I’ve been nnco faithless mysel’, God forgive me ! I got 
grieving to see the wicked in sic prosperity. I did na gang 
into the sanctuary eneugh, an’ therefore I could na see the 
end of these men — how He does take them up suddenly after 
all, an’ cast them doun : vanish they do, perish, an’ come to 
a learful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, so 
shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city. Oh, 
but it’s a day o’ God ! An’ yet I’m sair afraid for thae puir 
feckless French. I ha’ na faith, ye ken, in the Celtic blude, 
an’ its spirit o’ lees. The Saxon spirit o’ covetize is a grew- 
sorne house-fiend, and sae’s our Norse speerit o’ shifts an’ 
dodges ; but the spirit of lees is warse. Puir lustful Reubens 
that they are ! — unstable as water, they .shall not excel. 
Well, well — after all, there is a God that judgeth the earth ; 
an’ when a man kens that, he’s learnt eneugh to last him till 
he dies.” 




CHAPTER XXXIL 

THE TOWER OF BABEL. 

A. "lorious people vibrated again 
The lightning of the nations; Liberty 
From heart to heart, from tower to tower, o’er France, 
Scattering contagious fire into the sky, 

Gleamed. My soul spurned the chains of Its dismay; 

And in the rapid plumes of song 
Clothed itself sublime and strong. 

Sublime and strong ? Alas ! not so. An outcast, heart- 
less, faithless, and embittered, I went forth IVom my ])rison. 
But yet Louis Philijipe had fallen ! And as I whirled back 
to Babylon and want, discontent and discord, my heart was 
light, my breath came thick and fierce. The incubus of 
France had fallen ; and from land to land, like the heacon- 
fire which leapt from peak to peak proclaiming Troy’s down- 
fall, passed on the glare of burning idols, the crash of falling 
anarchies. Was I mad, sinful? Both — and yet neither. 
Was I mad and sinful, if on my return to my old haunts, 
amid the grasp of loving hands, and the caresses of those who 
called me in their honest flattery a martyr and a hero — what 
things, as Carlyle says, men will fall down and worship in 
their extreme need 1 was I mad and sinful, if daring hopes 
arose, and desperate words were spoken, and wild eyes read in 
wild eyes the thoughts they dare not utter ? “ Liberty has 

risen from the dead, and we too will be free !” 

Yes, mad and sinful; therefore are we as we are. Yet 
God has forgiven us — perhaps so have those men whose for- 
giveness is alone worth having. 

Liberty ? And is that word a dream, a lie, the watchword 
only ot rebellious fiends, as bigots say even now? Our fore- 
fathers spoke not so — 

The shadow of her coming fell 
On Saxon Alfred’s olive-tinctured brow. 

Had not freedom, progressive, expanding, descending, been 
the glory and the strength of England ? Were Magna 
Charta and the Habeas Corpus Act, Hampden’s resistance to 
ship-money, and the calm, righteous might of 1688 — were 
they all futilities and fallacies? Ever downward, for seven 
hundred years, welling from the heaven-watered mountain- 
peaks of wisdom, had spread the stream of liberty. The 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


283 


nobles had gained their charter from John ; the middle classes 
from William of Orange : was not the time at hand, when 
Ifom a Queen, more gentle, charitable, upright, spotless, than 
had ever sat on the throne of England, the working masses in 
their turn should gain their Charter ? 

If it was given, the gift was hers : if it was demanded 
to the uttermost, the demand would be madcj not on her, but 
on those into \vhose hands her power had passed, the avowed 
representatives neither of the Crown nor of the people, but of 
the very commercial class w^hich was devouring us. 

Such was our dream. Insane and wicked were the passions 
which accompanied it ; insane and wicked were the means 
we chose ; and God in His mercy to us, rather than to Mam- 
mon, triumphant in his iniquity, fattening his heart even now 
for a spiritual day of slaughter more learful than any physical 
slaughter which we in our folly had prepared for him — God 
frustrated them. 

We confess our sins. Shall the Chartist alone be excluded 
from the promise, “ if we confess our sins, God is faithful and 
just to forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteous- 
ness?” 

And yet, were there no excuses for us ? I do not say for 
myself^ — and yet three years of prison might he some excuse for 
a soured and harshened spirit — but I will not avail myself of 
the excuse; for there were men, stancher Chartists than ever 
1 had been — men who had suffered not only imprisonment, 
but loss of health and loss of fortune; men whose influence 
with the workmen was far wider than my own, and whose 
temptations were therefore all the greater, who manfully and 
righteously kept themselves aloof from all those frantic schemes 
and now reap their reward, in being acknowledged as the true 
leaders of the artisans, while the mere preachers ol' sedition are 
scattered to the winds. 

But were there no excuses for the mass? Was there no 
excuse in the spirit with which the English upper classes re- 
garded the continental revolutions? No excuse in the undis- 
guised dislike, fear, contempt, which they expressed for that 
very sacred name of Liberty, which had been for ages the 
pride of England and her laws — 

'Flic old laws of England, they 

VV^iose reverend heads with age are gray — 

Children of a wiser day — 

And whose solemn voice must be 
Thine own echo, Liberty ! 


284 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


for which, according to the latest improvements, is now suV 
stitnted a bureaucracy of despotic commissions ? Shame upon 
those who sneered at the very name of her to whom they 
owed the wealth they idolize ! who cry down Liberty because 
God has given it to them in such priceless abundance, bound- 
less as the sunshine and the air of heaven, that they are be- 
come unconscious of it as of the elements by which they live! 
Woe to those who despise the gift of God I Woe to those 
who have turned His grace into a cloak for tyranny; who, like 
the Jews of old, have trampled under foot His covenant at the 
very moment that they were asserting their exclusive right to 
it, and denying His all-embracing love ! 

And were there no excuses, too, in the very arguments which 
nineteen-twentieths of the public press used to deter us from 
following the example of the Continent ? If there had been 
one word of sympathy with the deep wrongs of France, 
Germany, Italy, Hungary — one attempt to discriminate the 
righteous and God-inspired desire of freedom, from man’s 
furious and self-willed perversion of it, we would have listened 
to them. But, instead, what was the first, last, cardinal, 
crowning argument ? “ The cost of sedition !” “ Revolutions 
interfered with trade I” and therefore they were damnable I 
Interfere with the food and labor of the millions? The mil- 
lions "would take the responsibility of that upon themselves. 
If the party of order cares so much for the millions, why had 
they left them what they are? No ; it was with the profits of 
the few that revolutions interfered; with the Divine right, not 
so much of kings, but of money-making. They hampered 
Mammon, the very fiend who is devouring the masses. The 
one end and aim of existence was the maintenance of order — 
of peace and room to make money in. And therefore Louis’s 
spies might make France one great inquisition-hell ; German 
princelets might sell their country piecemeal to French or 
Russian ; the Hungarian constitution, almost the counterpart 
of our own, might be sacrificed at the will of an idiot or 
'a villain ; Papal misgovernment might continue to render 
Rome a worse den of thieves than even Papal supersti- 
tion could have made it without the addition of tyrannv ? 
but Order must be maintained, for how else could the fe’w 
make money out of the labor of the many ? These were their 
own arguments. Whether they were likely to conciliate the 
workman to the powers that be, by informing him that those 
powers were avowedly the priests of the very system which 
was crushing him, let the reader judge. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


285 


The maintenance of order — of the order of disorder — that 
was to be the new God before whom the working classes 
w’ere to bow in spell-bound awe : an idol more despicable 
and empty than even that old divine right of tyrants, newly 
applied by some well-meaning but illogical personages, not 
merely as of old to hereditary sovereigns, but to Louis Phil- 
ippes, usurers, upstarts — why not hereafter to demagogues ? 
Blindfold and desperate bigots ! who would actually thus, in 
the imbecility of terror, deify that very right of the physically 
strongest and cunningest, which, if any thing, is anti-christ 
itself. That argument against sedition, the workmen heard ; 
and, recollecting 1688, went on their way, such as it was, 
unheeding. 

One word more, even at the risk of oflending many whom I 
should be very sorry to offend, and I leave this hateful discussion. 
Let it ever be remembered that the working classes considered 
themselves deceived, cajoled, by the passers of the Reform 
Bill ; that they cherished — whether rightly or wrongly it is 
now too late to ask — a deep-rooted grudge against those who 
had, as they thought, made their hopes and passions a step- 
ping-stone toward their own selfish ends. They Avere told to 
support the Reform Bill, not only on account of its intrinsic 
righteousness — which God forbid that I should deny — but 
because it was the first of a glorious line of steps toward their 
enfranchisement; and now the very men who told them this, 
talked peremptorily of “ finality,” showed themselves the most 
dogged and careless of conservatives, and pooh-poohed away 
every attempt at further enlargement of the suffrage. They 
were told to support it as the remedy for their own social 
miseries; and behold, those miseries were year by year be- 
coming deeper, more wide-spread, more hopeless ; their en- 
treaties for help and mercy, in 1842, and at other times, had 
been lazily laid by unanswered ; and almost the only prac- 
tical efforts for their deliverance had been made by a Tory 
nobleman, the honored and beloved Lord Ashley. They found 
that they had, in helping to pass the Reform Bill, only helped 
to give power to the two very classes who crushed them — the 
great labor-kings, and the small shopkeepers ; that they had 
blindly armed their oppressors with the additional weapon of 
an ever-increasing political majority. They had been told, 
too (let that never be forgotten), that in order to carry the 
Reform Bill, sedition itself was lawful ; they had seen the 
master-manufacturers themselves give the signal for the plug 
riots, by stopping their mills. Their vanity, ferocity, sense 


I- , 


286 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOK AND POET. 

oi' latent and fettered power, pride of numbers, and physical 
strength, had been flattered and pampered by those who now 
talked only of grape-shot and bayonets. They had heard 
the Reform Bill carried by the threats of men of rank and 
power, that “ Manchester should march upon London.” Were 
their masters, then, to have a monopoly in sedition, as in every 
thing else ? What had been fair in order to compel the Re- 
form Bill, must surely be fairer still to compel the fulfillment 
of Reform Bill pledges ? And so, imitating the example 
of those who they fancied had first used and then deserted 
tham, they, in their madness, concocted a rebellion, not pri- 
marily against the laws and constitution of their land, but 
against Mammon — against that accursed system of competi- 
tion, slavery of labor, absorption of the small capitalists by 
the large ones, and of the workmen by all, v/hich is, and was 
and ever will be, their internecine foe. Silly and sanguinary 
enough, were their schemes, God knows I and bootless enough, 
had they succeeded ; for nothing flourishes in the revolution- 
ary atmosphere but that lowest embodiment of Mammon, 
“ the black pool of Agio,” and its money-gamblers. But the 
battle remains still to be fought ; the struggle is internecine ; 
only no more with weapons of flesh and blood, but with a 
mightier weapon — Avith that association which is the true 
bane of Mammon — the embodiment of brotherhood and love. 

We should have known that before the tenth of April 1 
Most true, reader — but wu’ath is blindness. You too, surely, 
have read more wisdom than you have practiced yet ; seeing 
that you have your Bible, and perhaps, too. Mill’s “ Political 
Economy.” Have you perused therein the priceless chapter 
“On the probable Futurity of the Laboring Classes]” If 
not, let me give you the reference — vol. ii., p. 315, of the 
Second Edition. Read it, thou self-satisfied Mammon, and 
perpend ; for it is both a prophecy and a doom ! 

But, the reader may ask. How did you, with your experi- 
ence of the^ reason, honesty, moderation, to be expected of 
mobs, join in a plan which, if it had succeeded, must have 
let loose on those “who had” in London, the whole flood of 
those “ who had not ]” 

The reader shall hear. My story may be instructive, as a 
type of the feelings of thousands besides me. 

It was the night after I had returned from D ; sitting 

in Crossthwaite s little room, I had heard with mingled anx- 
iety and delight the plans of my friends. They were about 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


287 


to present a monster petition in favor of the Charter ; to ac 
company it cn vmsse to the door of the House of Commons ; 
and if it was refused admittance — why then, ulterior measures 
were the only hope. “And they will refuse it I” said Crossth- 
waite ; “ they’re going, I hear, to revive some old law or 
other, that forbids processions within such and such a distance 
of the House of Commons. Let them forbid ! To carry arms, 
to go in public procession, to present petitions openly, instead 
of having them made a humbug of by being laid on the table 
unopened, by some careless mentber — they’re our rights, and 
we’ll have them. There’s no use mincing the matter : it’s 
like the old fable of the farmer and his wheat — if we want it 
reaped, we must reap it ourselves. Public opinion, and the 
pressure from without, are the only things which have carried 
any measure in England for the last twenty years. Neither 
Whigs nor Tories deny it ; the governed govern their gov- 
ernors — that’s the ‘ordre du jour' just now — and we’ll have 
our turn at it ! We’ll give tho«e House of Commons oligarchs 
— those tools of the squires and the shop-keepers — we’ll give 
them a taste of pressure from without, that shall make the bar 
of the House crack again. And then to be under arms, day 
and night, till the Charter’s granted !” 

“ And if it is refused ?” 

“ Fight I that’s the word, and no other. There’s no other 
hope. No Charter — No social reforms 1 We must give 
them ourselves, for no one else wdll. Look there, and judge 
for yourself I” 

He pulled a letter out from among his papers, and threw 
it across to me. 

“ What’s this V 

“ That came while you were in jail. There don’t want 
many words about it. We sent up a memorial to govern- 
ment about the army and police clothing. We told ’em 
how it was the lowest, most tyrannous, most ill-paid of all 
the branches of slo})-making ; how men took it only M'hen 
they were starved out of every thing else. We entreated 
them to have mercy on us — entreated them to interfere 
between the merciless contractors, and the poor wretches on 
whose flesh and blood contractors, sweaters, and colonels 
were all fattening ; and there’s the answer we got. Look at 
it ; read it ! Again and again I’ve been minded to placard it 
on the walls, that all the world might see the might and the 
mercies of the government. * Read it ! ‘ Sorry to say that it 

is utterly out of the power of her Majesty’s s to interfere 


iSS ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

— as the question of wages rests entirely between the contract* 
or and the workmen.’” 

“ He lies!” I said. “ If it did, the workmen might put a 
pistol to the contractor’s head, and say — ‘ You shall not tempt 
the poor, needy, greedy, starving workers to their own destruc- 
tion, and the destruction of their class ; you shall not offer 
these murderous, poisonous prices. If we saw you offering 
our neighbor a glass of laudanum, we would stop you at all risks 
— and we will stop you now.’ No! no ! John, the question 
don’t lie between workmen and contractor, but between 
workman and contractor-plus-grape-and-bayonets !” 

“ Look again. There’s worse comes after that. ‘ If gov- 
ernment did interfere, it would not benefit the workman, as 
his rate, of wages depends entirely on the amount of compe- 
tition between the workmen themselves.’ Yes, my dear 
children, you must eat each other ; we are far too fond 
parents to interfere with so delightful an amusement ! Curse 
them — sleek, hard-hearted, impotent, do-nothings ! They 
confess themselves powerless against competition — powerless 
against the very devil that is destroying us, faster and faster 
every year ! They can’t help us on a single point. They 
can’t check population ; and if they could, they can’t get rid 
of the population which exists. They daren’t give us a com 
prehensive emigration-scheme. They daren’t lift a finger to 
prevent gluts in the labor-market. They daren’t interfere 
between slave and slave, between slave and tyrant. They 
are cowards, and like cowards they shall fall 1” 

“ Ay — like cowards they shall fall !” I answered ! and 
from that moment I was a rebel and a conspirator. 

“ And will the country join us V’ 

“The cities will; never mind the country. They are too 
weak to resist their own tyrants — and they are too weak to 
resist us. The country’s always driveling in the background. 
A country-party’s sure to be a party of imbecile bigots. No- 
body minds them.” 

1 laughed. “It always was so, John. When Christianity 
first spread, it was in the cities— till a pagan, a villager, got 
to mean a heathen for ever and ever,” 

“ And so it was in the French revolution ; when Popery 
had died out of all the rest of France, the priests and the 
aristocrats still found their dupes in the remote provinces.” 

“ The sign of a dying systsm that, be sure. Woe to Tory- 
ism and the Church of England, and every thing else, when 
it gets to boasting that its stronghold is still the ixcarts of the 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 289 

agricultural poor. It is the cities, John, the cities, where the 
light dawns first — Avhere man meets man, and spirit quickens 
spirit, and intercourse breeds knowledge, and knowledge sym- 
pathy and sympathy enthusiasm, combination, power irresist- 
ible ; while the agriculturists remain ignorant, selfish, weak, 
because they are isolated from each other. Let the country 
go. The towns shall win the Charter for England ! And 
then for social reform, sanitary reform, sedile reform, cheap 
food, interchange of free labor, liberty, equality, and brother- 
hood forever !” 

Such was our Babel-tower, whose top should reach to 
heaven. To understand the maddening allurement of that 
dream, you must have lain, like us, for years in darkness and 
the pit. You must have struggled for bread, for lodging, for 
cleanliness, for water, for education — for all that makes life 
worth living — and found them becoming, year by year, more 
hopelessly impossible, if not to yourself, yet still to the millions 
less gifted than yourself ; you must have sat in darkness and 
the shadow of death, till you are ready to welcome any ray 
of light, even though it should be the glare of a volcano 

N 


CHAPTEE. XXXIII. 


A PATRIOT’S REWARD. 

I NEVEPw shall forget one evening’s walk, as Crossthwaite 
and I strode back together from the Convention. We had 
walked on some way arm-in-arm in silence, under the crush- 
ing and embittering sense of having something to conceal — 
soniething, which if those who passed us so carelessly in the 
street had known — ! It makes a villain and a savage of a 
man, that consciousness of a dark, hateful secret. And it 
was a hatefnl one ! a dark and desperate necessity, which 
we tried to call by noble names, that faltered on our lips as 
we pronounced them; for the spirit of God was not in us; 
and instead of bright hope, and the clear fixed lode-star of 
duty, weltered in our imaginations a wild possible future of 
'itomult, and flame, and blood. 

“ It must be done ! it shall be done ! it will be done !” 
burst out John, at last, in that positive, excited tone, which 
indicated a half disbelief of his own words. “ I’ve been read- 
ing Macerone on street warfare ; and I see the way as clear 
as day.” 

I 1‘elt nothing but the dogged determination of despair. 
“ It must be tried, if the worst comes to the worst — but I 
have no hope. I read Somerville’s answer to that Colonel 
Macerone. Ten years ago he showed it was impossible. 
We can not stand against artillery ; we have no arms.” 

“I’ll tell you where to buy plenty.' There’s a man. Pow- 
er, or Bower, he’s sold hundreds in the last few days ; and he 
understands the matter. He tells us we’re certain, safe. 
There are hundreds of young men in the government-ofliccs 
ready to join, if we do but succeed at first. It all depends on 
that. The first hour settles the fate of a revolution.” 

“If we succeed, yes — the cowardly world will always side 
with the conquering party ; and we shall have every pick- 
pocket and ruffian in our wake, plundering in the name of 
liberty and order.” 

“Then we’ll shoot tlrem like dogs, as the French did! 
‘ Mort au'voleurs’ shall be the word !” 

“ Unless they shoot us. The French had a national guard, 
who had property to lose, and took care of it. The shop- 
keepers here will be all against us ; they’ll all be sworn in 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


291 


special constables, to a man ; and between them and the 
soldiers, we shall have three to one upon us.” 

“ Oh ! that Power assures me the soldiers will fraternize. 
He says there are three regiments at least have promised sol- 
emnly to shoot their officers, and give up their arms to the 
mob.” 

“ Very important, if true — and very scoundrelly, too. I’d 
sooner be shot myself by fair fighting, than see officers shot 
by cowardly treason.” 

“ Well, it is ugly. I like fair play as well as any man 
But it can’t be done. There must be a surprise, a coup de 
main, as the French say” (poor Crossthwaite was always 
quoting French in those days). “ Once show our strength — 
burst upon the tyrants like a thunderclap ; and then ! — 

Men of England, heirs of glory, 

Heroes of unwritten story, 

Rise, shake off the'chains like dew 
Which in sleep have fallen on you ! 

Ye are many, they are few!” 

“That’s just what I am afraid they are not. Let’s go 
and find out this man Power, and hear his authority for the 
soldier-story. Who knows him ?” 

“ Why, Mike Kelly and he have been a deal together of 
late. Kelly’s a true heart, now — a true Irishman — ready 
for any thing. Those Irish are the boys, after all — though I 
don’t deny they do bluster and have their way a little too 
much in the Convention. But still Ireland’s wrongs are 
England’s. We have the same oppressors. We must make 
common cause against the tyrants.” 

“ I wish to Heaven they would just have staid at home, 
and ranted on the other side of the water; they had their 
own way there, and no Mammonite middle-cla.ss to keep 
them down ; and yet they never did an atom of good. Their 
eloquence is all bombast, and what’s more, Crossthwaite, 
though there are some fine fellows among them, nine-tenths 
are liars — liars in grain, and you know it — ” 

Crossthwaite turned angrily to me. “ Why, you are get- 
ting as reactionary as old Mackaye himself!” 

“ I am not — and he is not. I am ready to die on a bar- 
ricade to-morrow, if it comes to that. I haven’t six months’ 
lease of life — I am going into a consumption; and a bullet 
is as easy a death as spitting up my lungs piecemeal. But ] 
despise these Irish, because I can’t trust them — they can’t 
trust each other — they can’t trust tliemselves. You know as 


2«2 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


well as I that you can’t get common justice done in Ireland, 
because you can depend on no man’s oath. You know as 
w.ell as I, that in Parliament or out, nine out of ten of them 
will stick at no lie, even if it has been exposed and refuted 
fifty times over, provided it serves the purpose of the moment ; 
and I often think, that after all, Mackaye’s right, and what’s 
the matter with Ireland is just that and nothing else — that 
from the nobleman in his castle to the beggar on his dunghill, 
they are a nation of liars, John Crossthwaite !” 

“ Sandy’s a prejudiced old Scotchman,” 

“ Sandy's a wiser man than you or I, and you know it.” 

•“ Oh, I don’t deny that ; but he’s getting old, and I think 
he has been failing in his mind of late.” 

“ I’m afraid he’s failing in his health ; he has never been 
the same man since they hooted him down in John-street. 
But he hasn’t altered in his opinions one jot ; and I’ll tell 
you what — I believe he’s right. I’ll die in this matter like 
a man, because it’s the cause of liberty ; but I’ve fearful 
misgivings about it, just because Irishmen are at the head 
of it.” 

“ Of course they are— they have the deepest wrongs ; and 
that makes them most earnest in the cause of right. The 
sym^xithy of suffering, as they say themselves, has bound 
them to the English working-man against the same oppress- 
ors.” 

“ Then let them fight those oppressors at home, and wee’ll 
do the same ; that’s the true way to show sympathy. Charity 
begins at home. They are always crying “Ireland for the 
Irish why can’t they leave England for the English ?” 

“ You’re envious of O’Connor’s power !” 

“ Say that again, John Crossthwaite, and we part for 
ever!” and I threw off his arm indignantly. 

“ No — but — don’t let’s quarrel, my dear old fellow — now, 
that perhaps, perhaps we may never meet again — but I can’t 
bear to hear the Irish abused. They’re noble, enthusiastic, 
generous fellows. If we English had half as warm hearts, 
we shouldn’t be as we are now; and O’Connor’s a glorious 
man, I tell you. Just think of him, the descendant of the 
ancient kings, throwing away his rank, his name, all he had 
in the world, for the cause of the sufiering millions 1” 

“ That’s a most aristocratic speech, John,” said I, smiling, 
in spite of my gloom. V‘ So you keep a leader because he’s 
J^scended from ancient kings, do you I should prefer him 
just because he was not — just because he was a working* 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


-293 


man, and come of workmen’s blood. We shall see ; we shall 
see whether he’s stanch, after all. To my mind, little 
Cnfly’s worth a great deal more, as far as earnestness goes.” 

“ Oh ! Cuffy’s a low-bred, uneducated fellow !” 

“ Aristocrat again, John !” said I, as we went up-stairs to 
Kelly’s room ; and Crossthwaite did not answer. 

There was so great a hubbub inside Kelly’s room, of 
English, French, and Irish, all talking at once, that we 
knocked at intervals for full five minutes, unheard by the 
noisy crew ; and I, in despair, was trying the handle, which 
was fast, when, to my astonishment, a heavy blow was struck 
on the panel from the inside, and the point of a sharp instru- 
ment driven right through, close to my knees, with the ex- 
clamation, 

“ What do you think o’ that, now, in a policeman’s bread- 
basket ?” 

“ I think,” answered I, as loud as I dared, and as near the 
dangerous door, “ if I intended really to use it, I wouldn’t 
make such a fool’s noise about it.” 

There was a dead silence ; the door was hastily opened, 
and Kelly’s nose poked out; while we, in spite of the horrible- 
ness of the whole thing, could not help laughing at his face 
of terror. Seeing who we were, he welcomed us in at once, 
into a miserable apartment, full of pikes and daggers, brand- 
ished by some dozen miserable, ragged, half-starved artisans. 
Three-fourths, I saw at once, were slop-working tailors. There 
was a bloused and bearded Frenchman or two ; but the major- 
ity were, as was to have been expected, the oppressed, the 
starved, the untaught, the despairing, the insane ; “ the danger- 
ous classes,” which society creates, and then ‘shrinks in horror, 
like Frankenstein, from the monster her own clumsy ambition 
has created. Thou Frankenstein Mammon ! hast thou not 
had warnings enough, either to make thy machines like men, 
or stop thy bungling, and let God make them for Himself] 

I will not repeat what I heard there. There is many a 
frantic ruffian of that night now sitting “ in his right mind” 
— though not yet “ clothed” — waiting for God’s deliverance, 
rather than his own. 

We got Kelly out of the room into the street, and began 
inquiring of him the whereabouts of this said Bower, or 
Power. “He didn’t know” — the feather-head Dd Irishman 
that he was ! — “ Faix, by-the-by, he’d forgotten — an’ ho 
went to look for him at the place he tould him, and they 
didn’t know sich a one there — ” 


294 


A.LTON LOCKE, TAILOK AND POET. 


“Oh, oh! Mr. Power has an alihi^ then ? Perhaps an 
alias too ?” 

“ He didn’t know his name rightly. Some said it was 
Brown ; but he was a broth of a boy — a thrue people’s man. 
Bedad, he guv’ away arms afthen and afthen to them that 
eouldn’t buy ’em. An’ he’s as free-spoken — oeh, but he’s put 
me into the eonfidenee ! come down the street a bit, and I’ll 
tellyees. I’li be Lord Lieutenant o’ Dublin Castle meself, if 
it succades, as shure as there’s no snakes in ould Ireland, an’ 
revenge her wrongs ankle deep in the bhlood o’ the Saxon ! 
Whirroo ! for the marthyred memory o’ the three hundred 
thousint vargens o’ Wexford !” 

“ Hold your tongue, you ass !” said Crossthwaite, as he 
clapped his hand over his mouth, expecting every moment to 
find us all three in the Pv.hadamanthine grasp of a policeman ; 
while I stood laughing, as people will, for mere disgust at the 
ridiculous which almost always intermingles with the horrible. 

At last, out it came — 

“ Bedad ! we’re going to do it ! London’s to be set o’ fire 
in seventeen places at the same moment, an’ I’m to light two 
of them to me own self, and make a hollycrust — ay, that’s 
the word — o’ Ireland’s scorpions, to sting themselves to death 
in circling flame — ” 

“ You would not do such a villainous thing?” cried we, both 
at once. 

“ Bedad ! but I won’t harm a hair o’ their heads ! Shure, 
we’ll save the women and childer alive, and run for the fire- 
ingins our blessed selves, and then out with the pikes, and 
seize the Bank and the Tower — 

An’ av’ I lives, I lives victhorious, 

An’ av’ I dies, my sowl in glory is ; 

Love fa — a — are — well !” 

I was getting desperate : the whole thing seemed at once 
so horrible and so impossible. There must be some villainous 
trap at the bottom of it. 

“ If you don’t tell me more about this fellow Power, Mike,’* 
said I, “I’ll blow your brains out on the spot: either you or 
he are villains.” And I valiantly pulled out my only weapon, 
the door-key, and put it to his head. 

^ “Och! are ye mad, thin? He’s a broth of a boy; and 
I’ll tell ye. Shure he knows all about the red-coats, case he’s 
an arthillery-man himself, and tlrat’s the way he’s found out 
his gran’ combustible.” 


295 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

“ An artillcry-man ?” said John. “ He told me he was a 
writer for the press !” 

“ Bedad, thin, he’s mistaken himself intirely ; for he tould 
me with his own mouth. And I’ll show ye the thing he sowld 
me as is to do it. Shure, it’ll set fire to the stones o’ the street, 
av’ ye pour a bit vitriol on it.” 

“Set fire to stones? I must see that before I believe it.” 

“ Shure an’ ye shall then. Where’ll I buy a bit ? Sorra 
a shop is there open this time o’ night ; an’ troth I forget the 
name o’, it inlirely ! Poker o’ Moses, but here’s a bit in my 
pocket !” 

And out of his tattered coat-tail he lugged a flask of pow’dor 
and a lump of some cheap chemical salt, whose name I have, 
1 am ashamed to say, forgotten. 

“ You’re a pretty fellow to keep such things in the same 
pocket with gunpowder !” 

“ Come along to Mackaye’s,” said Crossthwaite. “ I’ll see 
to the bottom of this. Be hanged, hut I think the fellow’s a 
cursed moiichard — some government-spy !” 

“Spy is he, thin ? Och ! the thief o’ the world ! I’ll stab 
him ! I’ll murther him ! an’ burn the town aftherward, all 
the same.” 

“Unless,” said I, “just as you’ve got your precious com 
bustible to blaze offi up he comes from behind the corner and 
gives you in charge to a policeman. It’s a villainous trap, 
you miserable fool, as sure as the moon’s in heaven.” 

“ Upon my word, I am afraid it is — and I’m trapped, 
too.” 

“Blood and turf 1 thin, it’s he that I’ll trap, thin. There’s 
two million free and inlightened Irishmen in London, to 
avenge my marthyrdorn wi’ pikes and baggonets like raving 
salviges, and blood for blood !” 

“Like savages, indeed!” said I to Crossthwaite. “And 
pretty savage company we are keeping. Liberty, like poverty, 
makes a man acquainted with strange companions !” 

“And who’s made ’em savages ? Who has left them 
SLvages ? That the greatest nation of the earth has had Ire- 
Iind in her hands. three hundred years — and her people still 
o be savages — if that don’t justify a revolution, what does ? 
Why, it’s just because these poor brutes are what they are, 
that rebellion becomes a sacred duty. It’s for them — for such 
fools, brutes, as that there, and the millions more like him, 
and likely to remain like him, that I’ve made up my mind to 
do or die to-morrow !” 


296 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 

There was a grand half-truth, distorted, rnis(/‘olored in the 
words, that silenced me for the time. ^ 

We entered Mackaje’s door; strangely enough at that 
time of night, it stood wide open. What could be the 
matter? I heard loud voices in the inner room, and ran 
forward calling his name, when, to my astonishment, out 
past me rushed a tall man, followed by a steaming kettle, 
which, missing him, took full effect on Kelly’s chest as he 
stood in the entry, filling his shoes wdth boiling water, and 
producing a roar that might have been heard at Temple-bar. 

“ What’s the matter ?” 

“Have I hit him ?” said the old man, in a state of unusual 
excitement. 

“ Bedad ! it was the man Power I the cursed spy ! An’ 
just as I was going to slate the villain nately, came the 
kittle, and kilt me all over !” 

“ Power ? He’s as many names as a pickpocket, and as 
many callings, too. I’ll warrant. He came sneaking in to 
tell me the sogers were a’ ready to gie up their arms if Pd 
come forward to them to-morrow. So I tauld him, sin’ he 
was so sure o’t, he’d better gang and tak the arms himsel’ ; 
an’ then he let out he’d been a policeman — ” 

“A policeman!” said both Crossthwaite and Kelly, with 
strong expletives. 

“ A policeman doon in Manchester ; I thought I kenned 
his face fra the first. And when the rascal saw he’d let out 
too much, he wanted to make out that he’d been a’ along a 
spy for the Chartists, while he was maltin’ believe to be a 
spy o’ the goovernment’s. Sae when he came that far, I just 
up wi’ the het water, and bleezed awa’ at him ; an’ noo I 
maun gang and het some mair, for my drap toddy.” 

Sandy had a little vitriol in the house, so we took the com- 
bustible down into the cellar, and tried it. It blazed up ; 
but burnt the stone as much as the reader may expect. We 
next tried it on a lump of wood. It just scorched the place 
where it lay, and then went out ; leaving poor Kelly perfectly 
frantic with rage, terror, and disappointment. Pie dashed up 
stairs, and out into the street, on a wild-goose chase after the 
rascal, and we saw no more of him that night. 

I relate a simple fact. I am afraid — perhaps, for the pool 
workmen’s sake, I should say I am glad, that it was not an 
unique one. Villains of this kind, both in April and in June, 
mixed among the working-men, excited their worst passions 
by bloodthirsty declamations and extravagant promises of 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


297 


Success, sold them arms ; and then, like the shameless Avretch 
on Avhose evidence Cufiy and Jones were principally convicted, 
bore witness against their own victims, unhlushingly declar- 
ing themselves to have been al.' along the tools of the govern- 
ment. ^ I entreat all those who disbelieve this apparently 
prodigious assertion, to read the evidence given on the trial 
ot the John-street conspirators, and judge for themselves. 

“ The petition’s filling faster than ever !” said Crossth- 
waite, as that evening we returned to Mackaye’s little back 
room. 

“ Dirt’s plenty,” grumbled the old man, who had settled 
himself again to his pipe, with his feet on the fender, and his 
head half way up the chimney. 

“Now or never !” went on Crossthwaite, without minding 
him; “Now or never! The manufacturing districts seem 
more firm than ever.” 

“An’ words cheap,” commented Mackaye, ?,otto voce. 

“ Well,” I said, “ Heaven keep us from the necessity of 
ulterior measures ! But what must be, must.” 

“ The government expect it, I can tell you. They’re in a 
pitiable funk, I hear. One regiment’s ordered to Uxbridge 
already, because they daren’t trust it. They’ll find soldiers 
are men, I do believe, after all.” 

“ Men they are,” said Sandy ; “ an’ therefore they’ll no be 
fools eneugh to stan’ by an’ see ye pu’ down a’ that is, to build 
up ye yourselves dinna yet rightly ken what. Men ? Ay, 
and wi’ mair common sense in them than some that had 
mair opportunities.” 

“ I think I’ve settled every thing,” went on Crossthwaite, 
who seemed not to have heard the last speech, “settled every 
thing — for poor Katie, I mean. If any thing happens to me, 
she has friends at Cork — she thinks so at least — and they’d 
get her out to service somewhere — God knows !” And hi.s 
iace worked fearfully for a minute. 

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori !” said I. 

“ There are twa methods o’ fulfilling that saw, I’m think- 
in’. Impreemis, to .shoot your neebor ; in secundis, to hang 
yoursel’.” 

“ What do you mean by grumbling at the whole thing in 
this way, Mr. Mackaye ? Are you, too, going to shrink back 
from The Cause, now that liberty is at the very doors ?” 

“On, then, I’m stanch encuch. I ha’ laid in my ain stock 
o’ wepons for the fecht at Armageddon.” 

N 


298 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ You don’t mean it? What have you got ?” 1 

“ A braw new halter, an’ a muckle nail. There’s a gran' : 
tough beam here ayont the ingle, will hand me a’ crouse and : 
cantie, when the time comes.” 

“ What on earth do you mean ?” asked we both together. ; 

“Ha’ ye looked into the monster-petition ?” 

“ Of course we have, and signed it too !” 

“ Monster ? Ay, ferlie ! Monstrum horrendum, informe, : 
iiigens, CLii lumen adeernptum. Desinit in piscem mulier for- j 
rnosa superne. Leeberty, the bonnie lassie, wi’ a sealgh’s fud 
to her! I’ll no sign it. I dinna consort wi’ shoplifters, an’ 
idiots, an’ suckin’ bairns — wi’ long nose an’ short nose an’ pug 
nose an seventeen Deuks o’ Wellington, let alone a baker’8 : 
dizen o’ Queens. It’s no company, that, for a puir auld patriot !” ; 

“Why, my dear Mackaye,” said I, “ you know the Reform 
Bill petitions were just as bad.” 

“ And the Anti-Corn-law ones too, for that matter,” said 
Crossthwaite. “You know we can’t help accidents; the 
petition will never be looked through.” 

“ It’s always been the plan with Whigs and Tories, too !” 

“ I ken that better than ye, I guess.” 

“ And isn’t every thing fair in a good cause ?” said Crossth 
waite. “ Desperate men really can’t be so dainty.” 

“ How lang ha’ ye learnit that deil’s lee, Johnnie ? Ye 
were no o’ that mind five year agone, lad. Ha’ ye been to 
Exeter — a’ the while ? A’s fair in the cause o’ Mammon ; 
in the cause o’ cheap bread, that means cheap w^ages ; but in 
the cause o’ God — wae’s me, that ever I suld see this day 
ower again ! ower again ! Like the dog to his vomit— just 
as it was ten, twenty, fifty years agone ! I’ll just ha’ a 
petition a’ alane to rnysel’ — I, an’ a twa or three honest men. 
Besides, ye’re just eight days ower time wi’ it.” 

“ What do you mean ?” 

“ Suld ha’ sent it in the 1st o’ April, an’ no the 10th ; a’ 
fool’s-day wud ha’ suited wi’ it ferlie !” 

“ Mr. Mackayc,” said Crossthwaite, in a passion, “ I shall 
certainly inform the Convention of your extraordinary lan- 
guage !” 

“ Do, laddie ! do, then ! An’ tell ’em this, too” — and, as 
he rose, his whole face and figure assumed a dignity, an aw- 
fulness, which I had never seen before in him— “tell them 

that ha driven out and , an’ every one that daur 

speak a word o’ common sense, or common humanity — them 
that stone the prophets, an’ quench the Spirit o’ God, and 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 299 

loys a lie, an’ them that male’ the same — them that think to 
bring about the reign o’ love an’ britherhood wi’ pikes an’ 
vitriol-bottles, murther an’ blasphemy — tell ’em than aiie o' 
fourscore years and mair — ane that has grawn gray in the 
people’s cause — that sat at the feet o’ Cartwright, an’ knelt 
by the death-bed o’ llabbie Burns — ane that cheerit Burdett 
as he went to the Tower, an’ spent his wee earnings for Hunt 
an’ Cobbett — ane that beheld the shaking o’ the nations in 
the ninety-three, and heard the birth-shriek o’ a new-born 
world — ane that while he was yet a callant saw.Liberty afar 
ofi, an’ seeing her was glad, as for a bonny bride, an’ followed 
her through the wilderness for threescore weary w^aeful years 
— sends them the last message that e’er he’ll send on airth ; 
tell’ em that they’re the slaves o’ warse than priests and 
kings — the slaves o’ their ain lusts an’ passions — the slaves o’ 
every loud-tongued knave an’ mountebank that’ll pamper 
them in their self-conceit ; and that the gude God ’ll smite 
’em down, and bring ’em to naught, and scatter ’em abroad, 
till they repent, an’ get clean hearts an’ a richt speerit within 
them, and learn His lesson that he’s been trying to teach ’em 
this threescore years — that the cause o’ the people is the cause 
o’ him that made the people ; an’ wae to them that tak’ the 
deevil’s tools to do his wark wi’ ! Gude guide us I — What 
was yon, Alton, laddie ?” 

“ What?” 

“ But I saw a spunk o’ fire fa’ into your bosom ! I’ve na 
faith in siccan heathen omens ; but auld Carlins wud say it’s 
a sign o’ death within the year — save ye from it, my puir 
rnisguidit bairn ! Aiblins a fire-flaught o’ my een, it might 
be — I’ve had them unco often the day — ” 

And he stooped down to the fire, and began to light his 
pipe, muttering to himself, 

“ Saxty years o’ madness ! saxty years o’ madness ! How 
lang, O Lord, before thou bring these puir daft bodies to their 
richt mind again ?” 

We stood watching him, and interchanging looks — expect 
ing something, we knew not what. 

Suddenly he sank forward on his knees, with his hands on 
the bars ol' the grate ; we rushed forward, and caught him 
up. He turned his eyes up to me, speechless, with a ghastly 
expression ; one side of his face was all drawn aside — and 
helpless as a child, he let us lift him to his bed, and there he 
lay, staring at the ceiling. 

Four weary days passed bv — it was the night of the ninth 


300 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


of April. In the evening of that day his speech returned to 
him on a sudden — he seemed uneasy about something, and 
several times asked Katie the day of the month. 

“ Before the tenth — ay, we maun pray for that. I doubt 
but I’m ower hearty yet — I canna bide to see the shame o’ 
that day — 

Na — I’ll tak’ no potions nor pills — gin it were iia for scruples 
o’ conscience, I’d apocartereeze a’thegither, after the manner 
o’ the ancient philosophers. But it’s no’ lawful, I misdoubt, 
to starve onesel’.” 

“ Here is the doctor,” said Katie. 

“Doctor? Wha ca’d for doctors? Canst thou adminis- 
ter to a mind diseased? Can ye tak’ long nose, an’ short 
nose, an’ snub nose, an’ seventeen Deuks o’ Wellingtons out 
o’ my puddins? Will your castor-oil, an’ your calomel, an’ 
your croton, do that ? D’ye ken a rnedicamentum that’ll pit 
brains into workmen — ? Non tribus Anticyris ! Tons o’ 
hellebore — acres o’ straitwaistcoats — a hall police-force o’ 
head-doctors winna do it. Juvat insanire — this their way is 
their folly, as auld Benjamin o’ Tudela saith of the heathen 
Heigho ! ‘Forty years lang was he greivit v/i’ this genera- 
tion, an’ swore in his wrath that they suldna enter into his 
rest.’ Pulse ? tongue ? ay, shak’ your lugs, an’ tak’ your fee. 
and dinna keep auld folk out o’ their graves. Can ye sing ?” 

The doctor meekly confessed his inability. 

That’s pity — or I’d gar ye sing Auld-lang-syne, — 

We twa hae paidlit in the burn — 

Aweel, aweel, aweel — ” 

Weary and solemn was that long night, as we sat there, 
with the crushing weight of the morrow on our minds, watch- 
ing by that death-bed, listening hour after hour to the ram- 
bling soliloquies of the old man, as ‘ he babbled of ffreen 
fields ;’ yet I verily believe that to all of us, especially to poor 
little Katie, the active present interest of tending him, kept 
us from going all but mad with anxiety and excitement. 
But it was weary work : and yet, too, strangely interesting, 
as at times there came scraps of old Scotch love-poetry, con- 
trasting sadly with the grim lips that uttered them — hints to 
me of some sorrow long since suffered, but never healed. I 
had never heard him allude to such an event before but once, 
on the first day of our acquaintance. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


301 


“ T went to the kirk, 

My luve sat afore me ; 

I trow my twa een 
Tauld him a sweet story. 

Aye wakin o’ — 

Wakin aye and weary — 

I thocht a’ the kirk 
Saw me an’ my deary. 

'Aye wakin o’ !’ — Do ye think, noo, we sail ha’ knowledge m 
the next warld o’ them we loved on eath 1 I askit that same 
o’ Rab Burns ance, sitting up a’ canty at Tibbie Shiel’s in 
Meggot Vale, an’ he said, puir chiel, he ‘didna ken ower well, 
we maun bide and see — bide and see — that’s the gran’ phi- 
losophy o’ life, after a’. Aiblins folk ’ll ken their true freens 
there; an’ there ’ll be na mair luve coft and sauld for siller — 

Gear and tocher is nccdit nane 
I’ the country whaur my luve is gane. 

Gin I had a true freen the noo ! to gang down the wynd, an’ 
find if it war but an auld Abraham o’ a blue-gown, wi’ a bit 
crowd, or a fizzle-pipe, to play me the Bush aboon Traquair! 
Na, na, na ; it’s singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, 
that wad be ; an’ I hope the application’s no irreverent, lor 
ane that was rearit amang the hills o’ God, an’ the trees o’ 
the forest which He hath planted. 

Oh the broom, an’ the bonny yellow broom. 

The broom o’ the Cowden-knowes ! 

Hech, but she wud lilt that bonnily ! Did ye ever gang 

listering saumons by nicht ? Ou, but it’s braw sport, wi’ the 
scars an’ the birks a’ glowering out blude-red i’ the torch- 
light, and the bonnic hizzies skelping an’ skirling on the 

bank There w^as a gran’ leddy, a bonny leddy, cam’ 

in and talked like an angel o’ God to puir auld Sandy, anent 
the salvation o’ his soul. But I tauld her no’ to fash hersel’. 
It’s no my view o’ human life, that a man’s sent into the 
warld just to save his soul, an’ creep out again. An’ I said 
I wad leave the savin’ o’ my soul to Him that made iify soul ; 
it was in richt gude keepin’ there I’d warrant. An’ then she- 
was unco fleyed when she found I didna hand wi’ the Athan- 
asian creed An’ I tauld her, na’ ; if He that died on the cross 
was sic a ane as she and I teuk him to be, there was na that 
pride nor spite in him, be sure, to send a pure auld sinful, 
guideless body to eternal fire, because he didna a’thegither un- 
derstand the honor due to His name.” 


302 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Who was this lady ?” 

He did not seem to know ; and Katie had never heard of 
her before — “ some district visitor” or other 1 

“ I sail* misdoubt but the auld creeds are in the right anent 
Him, after a*. I’d gie muckle to think it — -there’s na comfort 
as it is. Aiblins there might be a wee comfort in that, for a 
poor auld worn-out patriot. But it’s owcr late to change. I 
tauld her that, too, ance. It’s ower late to put new wine 
into auld bottles. I was unco drawn to the high doctrines 
ance, when I was a bit laddie, an’ sat in the wee kirk by my 
minnie an’ my daddie — a richt stern auld Cameronian sort o’ 
body he was, too ; but as I grew, and grew, the bed was ower 
short for a man to stretch himsel’ thereon, an’ the plaidie ower 
strait for a man to fauld himsel’ therein ; and so I had to gang 
my gate a’ naked in the matter o’ formulae, as Maister Tum- 
rnas has it.” 

“Ah! do send for a priest, or a clergyman!” said Katie, 
who partly understood his meaning, 

“ Parson ] He canna pit new skin on auld scars. Na bit 
stickit curate-laddie for me, to gang argumentin’ wi’ ane that’s 
auld enough to be his gran’father. When the parsons will 
hear me anent God’s people, then I’ll hear them anent God. 

Sae I’m wearing awa, Jean, 

To the land o’ the leal — 

Gin I ever get thither. Katie, here, hands wi’ purgatory, ye 
ken ; where souls are burnt clean again — like baccy-pipe — 

When Razor-brigg is ower and past, 

Every night and alle ; 

To Whinny Muir thou comest at last. 

And God reeeive thy sawle. 

Gin hosen an’ shoon thou gavest nane 
Every night and alle ; 

The whins shall pike thee intil the bane, 

And God receive thy sawle. 

Ainen.^ There’s mair things aboon, as well as below, than 
are dreamt o’ in our phibsophy. At least, where’er I go, I’ll 
meet no long-nose, nor short-nose, nor snub-nose patriots there ; 
nor puir gowks stealing the deil’s tools to do God’s wark wi’! 
Out among the eternities an’ the realities — it’s no that dreary 
outlook, after a’, to find truth an’ fact — naught but truth an’ 
fact — e’en beside the worm that dieth not, and the fire that 
is not quenched !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


303 


"*G()d forbid !” said Katie. 

“God do whatsoever shall 'please Him, Katie — an’ that’s 
aye gude, like Himsel’. Shall no the Judge of all the earth 
do right — right — right ?” 

And murmuring that word of words to himself, over and 
over, more and more faintly, he turned slowly over, and seem- 
ed to slumber — 

Some half-hour passed before we tried to stir him. He 
was dead. 

And the candles waned gray, and the great light streamed 
in through every crack and cranny, and the sun had risen on 
the Tenth of April What would be done before that sun 
had set ? 

What would be done? Just what we had the might to 
do ; and therefore, according to the formula on which we 
were about to act, that mights are rights, just what we had 
the right to do — nothing. Futility, absurdity, vanity, and 
vexation of spirit. I shall make my next a short chapter' 
It is a day to be forgotten — and forgiven. 





CHAPTEPv, XXXIV. 

THE TENTH OF APRIL. 

And he was gone at Jast! Kind women, whom his un- 
known charities had saved from shame, laid him out duly, 
and closed his eyes, and bound up that face that never would 
beam again with genial humor, those lips that would never 
again speak courage and counsel to the sinful, the oppressed 
the forgotten. And there he lay, the old warrior dead upon 
his shield ; worn out by long years of manful toil in The 
People’s Cause; and, saddest thought of all, by disappoint- 
ment in those for whom he spent his soul. True, he was 
aged ; no one knew how old. He had said, more than eighty 
years ; but we had shortened his life, and we knew it. He 
would never see that deliverance for which he had been toil- 
ing ever since the days when as a boy he had listened to 
Tooke and Cartwright, and the patriarchs of the people’s 
freedom. Bitter, bitter, were our thoughts, and bitter were 
our tears, as Crossthwaite and 1 stood watching that beloved 
face, now in death refined to a grandeur, to a youthful sim- 
plicity and delicacy, which we had never seen on it before — 
calm and strong — the square jaws set firm even in death — 
the lower lip still clenched above the upper, as if in a divine 
indignation and everlasting protest, even in the grave, against 
the devourers of the earth. Yes, he was gone — the old lion, 
worn out with many wounds, dead in his cage. Where could 
we replace him ? There were gallant men among us, eloquent, 
well-read, earnest — men whose names will ring through this 
land ere long — men who had been taught wisdom, even as he, 
by the sinfulness, the apathy, the ingratitude, as well as by 
the sufferings of their fellows. But where should we two 
find again the learning, the moderation the long experience, 
above all the more than woman’s tenderness of him whom 
we had lost? And at that time, too, of all others! Alas! 
we had despised his counsel ; wayward and fierce, we would 
have none of his reproof ; and now God had withdrawn him 
from us ; the righteous was taken away from the evil to come. 
For M^e knew that evil was coming. We felt all along that 
we should not succeed. But we were desperate ; and his 
death made us more desperate ; still at the moment it drew 
us nearer to each other. Yes — we wore rudderless upon a 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


305 


loaiintr sea, and all before us blank with lurid blinding mist ; 
but still w'e were together, to live and die; and as we looked 
into each other’s eyes, and clasped each other’s hands above 
the dead man’s face, we felt that there was love between us, 
as of Jonathan and David, passing the love of woman. 

Few words passed. Even our passionate artisan-natnre, so 
sensitive and voluble in general, in comparison with the cold 
reserve of the field-laborer and the gentleman, Was hushed in 
silent awe between the thought of the past and the thought 
of the future. We felt ourselves trembling between two 
worlds. We felt that to-morrow must decide our destiny — 
and we felt rightly, though little we guessed what that des- 
tiny would be ! 

But it was time to go. We had to prepare for the meet- 
ing, We must be at Kennington Common within three 
hours at furthest ; and Crossthwaite hurried away, leaving 
Katie and me to watch the dead. 

And then came across me the thought of another deathbed 
— my mother’s — How she had lain and lain, while I was* 
far away — And then I wondered whether she had suffered 
much, or faded away at last in a peaceful sleep, as he had — 
And then I w'ondered how her corpse had looked ; and pic- 
tured it to myself, lying in the little old room, day after day till 
they screwed the coffin down — before I came ! — Cruel ! Did 
she look as calm, as grand in death, as he who lay there ? 
And as I w'atched the old man’s features, I seemed to trace 
in them the strangest likeness to my mother’s. The strangest 
likeness ! I could not shake it offi It became intense — 
miraculous. Was it she, or was it he, who lay there ? 1 

shook myself and rose. My loins ached, my limbs were heavy, 
my brain and eyes swam round. I must be over-fatigued by 
excitement and sleeplessness. I would go down-stairs into the 
fresh air, and shake it off'. 

As I came down the passage, a woman, dressed in black, 
was standing at the door, speaking to one of the lodgers. 
“ And he is dead ! Oh, if I had but known sooner that he 
was even ill !” 

That voice — that figure — surely, I knew them ! — them, at 
least, there was no mistaking ! Or was it another phantom 
of my disordered brain 1 I pushed forward to the door, and 
as I did so she turned, and our eyes met full. It was she — 
Lady Ellerton I sad, worn, transformed by widow’s weeds, 
but that face was like no other’s still. Why did I drop my 
eves and draw back at the first glance like a guilty coward ? 


306 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


She beckoned me toward her, went out into the street, and 
herself began the conversation, from which I shrank, 1 
know not why. 

“ When did he die ? ’ 

“Just at sunrise this morning. But how came you here 
to visit him ? Were you the lady, who, as he said, came to 
him a few days since V 

She did not answer my question. “ At sunrise this morn 
ing ? A fitting time for him to die, before he sees the ruin 
and disgrace of those for whom he labored. And you, too, I 
hear, are taking your share in this projected madness and 
iniquity ?” 

“What right have you,” I asked, bristling up at a sudden 
suspicion that crossed me, “ to use such words about me?” 

“Recollect,” she answered, mildly but firmly, “your con- 
duct three years ago at D .” 

“ What,” I said, “ was it not proved upon my trial, that I 
exerted all my powers, endangered my very life to prevent 
outrage in that case ?” 

“ It was proved upon your trial,” she replied, in a marked 
tone ; “ but we were informed, and, alas 1 from authority only 
too good, namely, from that of an ear- witness, of the sanguin- 
ary and ferocious language which you were not afraid to use 
at the meeting in London, only two nights before the riot.” 

I turned white with rage and indignation. 

“Tell me,” I said — “tell me if you have any honor, who 
dared forge such an atrocious calumny ! No ! you need not 
tell me. I see well enough now. He should have told you 
that I exposed myself that night to insult, not by advocating, 
but by opposing violence, as I have always done — as I would 
now, were not I desperate — hopeless of any other path to 
liberty. And as for this coming struggle, have I not written 
to my cou.sin, humiliating as it was to me, to beg him to warn 
you all from me, lest — ” 

I could not finish the sentence. 

“ You wrote ? He has warned us, but he never mentioned 
your name. He spoke of his knowledge as having been pick- 
ed up by himself at personal risk to his clerical character.” 

“ The risk, I presume, of being known to have actually re- 
ceived a letter from a Chartist ; ljut I wrote — on my honor J 
wrote — a week ago ; and received no word of answer.” 

“Is this true?” she asked. 

“A man is not likely to deal in useless falsehoods, who 
knows not whether he shall live to see the set of sun I” 


) 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 307 

“ Then you are implicated in this expected insurrection ?” 

“ I am implicated,” I answered, “with the people; M'hal 
they do I shall do. Those who once called themselves the 
patrons of the tailor-poet, left the mistaken enthusiast, to 
languish for three years in prison, without a sign, a hint of 
mercy, pity, remembrance. Society has cast me off; and, in 
casting me off, it has sent me off to my own people, where 
I should have staid from the beginning. Now I am at my 
post, because I am among my class. If they triumph peace- 
iully, I triumph with them. If they need blood to gain theii 
rights, be it so. ,Let the blood be upon the head of those who 
refuse, not those who demand. At least, I shall be with my 
own people. And if I die, what better thing on earth can 
happen to me ?” 

“ But the law ?” she said. 

“ Do not talk to me of law ! I know it too well in practice 
to be moved by any theories about it. Laws are no law, but 
tyranny, when the few make them, in order to oppress the 
many by them.” 

“ Oh!” she said, in a voice of passionate earnestness, which 
I had never heard from her before, “ stop — for God’s sake, 
stop ! You know not what you are saying — what you arc 
doing. Oh ! that I had met you before — that I had had more 
time to speak to poor Mackaye ! Oh ! wait, wait — there is a 
deliverance for you! but never in this path — never. And just 
w’hile I, and nobler far than I, are longing and struggling to 
find the means of telling you your deliverance, you, in the 
madness of your haste, are making it impossible !” 

There was a wild sincerity in her words — an almost im 
ploring tenderness in her tone. 

“ So young!” she said ; “ so young to be lost thus !” 

I was intensely moved. I felt, I knew that she had a 
message for me. I felt that hers was the only intellect in the 
world to which I would have submitted mine ; and, for one 
moment, all the angel, and all the devil in me wrestled for 
the mastery. If I could but have trusted her one mo 
ment. ...... No ! all the pride, the spite, the suspicion, the 

prejudice of years, rolled back upon me. “An aristocrat! 
and she, too, the one who has kept me from Lillian!” And 
in my bitterness, not daring to speak the real thought within 
me, I answered with a flippant sneer, 

“ Yes, madam ! like Cordelia, so young, yet so untender ! 
Thanks to the mercies of the upper classes!” 

Did she turn away in indignation ? No, by Heaven ' 


308 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET, 


there was nothing upon her face but the intensest yearning 
pity. If she had spoken again, she would have conquered; 
but before those perfect lips could open, the thought of 
thoughts flashed across me. 

“ Tell me one thing ! Is my cousin George to be married 

to ” and I stopped. 

“ He is.” 

“And yet,” I said, “you wish to turn me back from dying 
on a barricade 1” And without waiting for a reply, I hurried 
down the street in all the fury of despair. 

I have promised to say little about the tenth of April, fo. 
indeed I have no heart to do so. Every one of Mackaye’s 
predictions came true. We had arrayed against us, by out 
own folly, the very physical force to which we had appealed. 
The dread of general plunder and outrage by the savages 
of London, the national hatred of that French and Irish in- 
terference of which we had boasted, armed against us thou- 
sands of special constables, who had in the abstract little or 
no objection to our political opinions. The practical common 
sense of England, whatever discontent it might feel with the 
existing system, refused to let it be hurled rudely down, on 
the mere chance of building up on its ruins something as yet 
untried, and even undefined. Above all, the people would 
not rise. Whatever sympathy they had with us, they did 
not care to show it. And then futility after futility exposed 
itself The meeting which was to have been counted by 
hundreds of thousands, numbered hardly its tens of thousands ; 
and of them a frightful proportion were of those very rascal- 
classes, against whom we ourselves had offered to be sworn 
in as special constables. O’Connor’s courage failed him after 
all. He contrived to be called away, at the critical moment, 
by some problematical superintendent of police. Poor Cufley, 
the honestest, if not the wisest, speaker there, leaped ofi* the 
wagon, exclaiming that we were all “ humbugged and be- 
trayed and the meeting broke up pitiably piecemeal, drench- 
ed and cowed, body and soul, by pouring rain on its way 
home — for the very heavens mercifully helped to quench oui 
folly — while the monster-petition crawled ludicrously av/ay in 
a hack cab, to be dragged to the floor of the House of Com- 
mons amid roars of laughter — “ inextinguishable laughter,’’ 
as of Tennyson’s Epicurean Gods. 

Careless of mankind. 

For they lie beside their neetar, and their bolts are burled 


• ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 309 

Ear below them in the valleys, and the elouds are lightly curled 
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world. 

There they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands. 

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and liery 
sands. 

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying 
hands. 

But they smile ^ they find a music., centred in a doleful song. 

Steaming up^ a lamentation., and an ancient tale of wrongs 
Like a tale of little meaning., though the words are strong ; 

Chanted by an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil. 

Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil. 

Storing little yearly dues of wheat, and wine, and oil ; 

Till they perish, and they suffer — some, ’tis whispered, down in hell 
Suffer endless anguish ! — 

Truly — truly, great poets’ words are vaster than the singers 
themselves suppotie ! 


CHAPTER XXXV. 


THE LOWEST DEEP. 

Sullen, disappointed, desperate, I strode along the streets 
that evening, careless whither I went. The people’s cause 
was lost — the Charter a laughing-stock. That the party 
which monopolizes w’ealth, rank, and, as it fancied, educa- 
tion and intelligence, should have been driven, degraded, to 
appeal to brute force for self-defense — that thought gave me 
a savage joy ; but that it should have conquered by that last, 
lowest resource ! That the few should be still stronger than 
the many, or the many still too cold-hearted and coward to 
face the few — that sickened me. I hated the well-born 
young special constables whom I passed, because they would 
have fought. I hated the gent and shopkeeper special con 
stables, because they w'^ould have run away. I hated my 
own party, because they had gone too far — because they had 
not gone far enough. 1 hated myself, because I had not pro- 
duced some marvelous effect — though what that was tc 
have been I could not tell — and hated myself all the more for 
that ignorance. 

A group of effeminate shopkeepers passed me, shouting 
“God save the Queen!” “Hypocrites!” I cried in my 
heart — they mean “ God save our shops !” Liars ! They 
keep up willingly the useful calumny, that their slaves and 
victims are disloyal as well as miserable ! 

I was utterly abased — no, not utterly ; for my self-contempt 
still vented itself — not in forgiveness, but in universal hatred 
and defiance. Suddenly I perceived my cousin, laughing and 
jesting with a party of fashionable young specials : I shrank 
from him ; and yet, I know not why, drew as near him as I 
could, unobserved — near enough to catch the words, 

“ Upon my honor, Locke, I believe you are a Chartist 
yourself at heart.” 

“ At least I am no Communist,” said he, in a significant 
tone. “There is one little bit of real property M'hich I have 
no intention of sharing with my neighbors.” 

“ What, the little beauty somewhere near Cavend’sh. 
square ?” 

“ That’s my business.” 


ALTON LOCKK, TAILOR AND POET. 


311 


“ Whereby you mean that you are on your way to her now ? 
Well, I am invited to the wedding, rcrnember.” 

He pushed on, laughingly, without answering. I followed 
him fast — “ near Cavendish-square !” — the very part of the 
town where Lillian lived ! I had had, as yet, a horror of going 
near it ; but now, an intolerable suspicion scourged me for- 
ward, and I dogged his steps, hiding behind pillars, and at 
the corners of streets, and then running on, till I got sight of 
him again. He went through Cavendish-square, up Harley- 
street — was it possible 1 [ gnashed my teeth at the thought. 

But it must be so. He stopped at the dean’s house, knocked, 
and entered, without parley. 

In a minute I was breathless on the door-step, and knocked. 
I had no plan, no object, except the wild wish to see my own 
despair. I never thought of the chances of being recognized 
by the servants, or of any thing else, except of Lillian by my 
cousin’s side. 

The footman came out smiling. “ What did I want ?” 

“ I_I_Mr. Locke.” 

“ Well, you needn’t be in such a hurry (with a signifi- 
cant grin). “ Mr. Locke’s likely to be busy for a few minutes, 
yet, I expect !” 

Evidently the man did not know me. 

“ Tell him that — that a person wishes to speak to him on 
particular business.” Though I had no more notion what 
that business was than the man himself 

“ Sit down in the hall.” 

And I heard the fellow, a moment afterward, gossiping and 
laughing with the maids below about “ the young couple.” 

To sit down was impossible ; my only thought was — where 
was Lillian ? 

Voices in an adjoining room caught my ear. His ! yes — 
and hers too — soft and low. What devil prompted me to 
turn eavesdropper ; to run headlong into temptation ? I was 
close to the dining-room door, but they were not there — evi- 
dently they were in the back room, which, as I knew, opened 
into it with folding doors. I — I must confess all. Noiselessly, 
with craft like a madman’s, I turned the handle, slipped in as 
stealthily as a cat — the folding-doors were slightly open. I 
had a view of all that passed within. A horrible fascination 
seemed to keep my eyes fixed on them, in spite of myself. 
Honor, shame, despair, bade me turn away, but in vain. 

r aaw them. How can I wTite it ? Yet I will. I saw 
u sitting together on the sofa. Their arms were round 


312 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


each other. Her head lay upon his breast ; he bent over her 
with an intense gaze, as of a basilisk, I thought ; how do 1 
know that it was not the fierceness of his love ? Who could 
have helped loving her ? 

Suddenly she raised her head, and looked up in his face — 
her eyes brimming with tenderness, her cheeks burning with 
mingled delight and modesty — their lips met, and clung togeth- 
er It seemed a life — an eternity — before they parted 

again. Then the spell was broken, and I rushed from the 
room. 

Faint, giddy, and blind, I just recollect leaning against the 
wall of the staircase. He came hastily out, and started as 
he saw me. My face told all. 

“What] Eavesdropping?” he said, in a tone of unuttera- 
ble scorn. I answered nothing, but looked stupidly and fixedly 
in his face, while he glared at me with that keen, burning, 
intolerable eye. I longed to spring at his throat, but that 
eye held me as the snake’s holds the deer. At last I found 
words. 

“Traitor! every where — in every thing — tricking me — 
supplanting me — in my friends — in my love !” 

“ Your love ? Yours ]” And the fixed eye still glared 
upon me. “ Listen, cousin Alton ! The strong and the weak 
have been matched for the same prize : and what wonder, 
if the strong man conquers? Go and ask Lillian aow she 
likes the thought of being a Communist’s love !” 

As when, in a nightmare, we try by a desperate efihrt to 
break the spell, I sprang forward, and struck at him ; he put 
my hand by carelessly, and felled me bleeding to the ground. 
I recollect hardly any thing more, till I found myself thrust 
into the street by sneering footmen, and heard them call after 
me “ Chartist” and “ Communist” as I rushed along the pave- 
ment, careless where I went. 

I strode and staggered on through street after street, run- 
ning blindly against passengers, dashing under horses’ heads, 
heedless of warnings and execrations, till I found myself, I 
know not how, on Waterloo Bridge. I had meant to go there 
when I left the door. I knew that at least — and now I was 
there. 

I buried myself in a recess of the bridge, and stared around 
and up and down. 

I was alone — deserted even by myself Mother, sister, 
friends, love, the idol of my life, were all gone. I could have 
borne that. But to be shamed, and know that I deserved 


ALTOxN LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


313 


it ; to be deserted by rny own honor, self-respect, strength of 
will — who can bear that ? 

I could have borne it, had one thing been left. Faith in 
rny own destiny — the inner hope that God had called me to 
do a work for him. 

“ What drives the Frenchman to suicide ?” I asked my- 
self, arguing ever even in the face, of death and hell : “ His 
faith in nothing but his own lusts and pleasures ; and when 
they are gone, then comes the pan of charcoal — and all is 
over. What drives the German? His faith in nothing but 
his own brain. He has fallen down and worshiped that 
miserable ‘ Ich’ of his, and made that, and not God’s will, 
the centre and root of his philosophy, his poetry, and his self- 
idolizing a3sthetics ; and when it fails him, then for prussic 
acid, and nonentity. Those old Romans, too — why, they are 
the very experimentum crucis of suicide ! As long as they 
fancied that they had a calling to serve the state, they could 
live on and suffer. But when they found no more work left 
for them, then they could die — as Portia died — as Cato — as 
I ought. What is there left for me to do ? outcast, disgraced, 
useless, decrepit — ” 

I looked out over the bridge into the desolate night. Be- 
low me the dark moaning river-eddies hurried downward. 
The wild west-wind howled past me, and leaped over the 
parapet downward. The huge reflection of Saint Paul’s, the 
great tap-roots of light from lamp and window that shone 
upon the lurid stream, pointed down — down — down. A 
black wherry shot through the arch beneath me, still and 
smoothly downward. My brain began to whirl madly — I 
sprang upon the step. A man rushed past me, clambered on 
the parapet, and threw up his arms wildly. A moment 
more, and he would have leaped into the stream. The sight 
recalled me to my senses — say, rather, it re-awoke in me the 
spirit of mankind. I seized him by the arm, tore him down 
upon the pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic 
struggles. It was Jemmy Downes ! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, 
blear-eyed, driveling, the worn-out gin-drinker stood, his mo- 
mentary paroxysm of strength gone, trembling and staggering. 

Why won’t you let a cove die ? Why won’t you let a 
cove die ? They’re all dead — drunk, and poisoned, and 
dead ! What is there left ?” he burst out suddenly in his 
old ranting style, “ what is there left on earth to live for ? 
The prayers of liberty are answered by the laughter of 
tyrants ; her sun is sunk beneath the ocean wave, and her 

O 


314 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

pipe put out by the raging billows of aristocracy ! Those 
starving millions of Kenningtoii Common — where are they ? 
Where ? I axes you,” he cried fiercely, raising his voice to a 
womanish scream, “ where are they ?” 

“Gone home to bed, like sensible people; and you -had 
better go too.” 

“ Bed ? I sold ours a month ago ; but we’ll go. Come along 
and I’ll show you my wife and family; and we’ll have a tea 
party — Jacob’s Island tea. Come along ! t 

Flea, flea, unfortunate flea ! 

Bereft of his wife and his small family !” 

He clutched my arm, and dragging me off toward the 
Surrey side, turned down Stamford-street. 

I followed half perforce ; and the man seemed quite de- 
mented — whether with gin or sorrow I could not tell. As he 
strode along the pavement, he kept continually looking back, 
with a perplexed terrified air, as if expecting some fearful 
object. 

“ The rats ! the rats ! don’t you see ’em coming out of the 
gully holes, atween the area railings — dozens and dozens ?” 

“ No ; I saw none.” 

“ You lie ; I hear their tails whisking ; there’s their shiny 
hats a glistening, and every one on ’em with peelers’ staves ! 
Quick I quick ! or they’ll have me to the station-house.” 

“ Nonsense !” I said ; “ we are free men ! What are the 
policemen to us ?” 

“ You lie !” cried he, with a fearful oath, and a wrench at 
my arm which almost threw me down. “ Do you call a 
sweater’s man a free man ]” 

■ “You a sweater’s man'?” 

“ Ay !” with another oath. “ My men ran away- — folks 
said I drank, too ; but here I am ; and 1, that sweated others, 
I’m sweated myself — and I’m a slave ! I’m a slave — a 
negro slave, I am, you aristocrat villain !” 

“ Mind me, Downes ; if you will go quietly, I will go with 
you ; but if you do not let go of my arm, I give you in charge 
to the first policeman I meet.” 

“ Oh, don’t, don’t whined the miserable wretch, as he 
almost fell on his knees, gin-drinkers’ tears running down his 
face; “ or I shall be too late. And then the rats ’ll get in at 
the roof, and up through the floor, and eat ’em all up, and my 
work too — the grand new three-pound coat that I’ve been 
stitching at this ten days, for the sum of one half-crown* 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


315 


sterling — and don’t I wish I may see the money ? Come on, 
quick ; there are the rats, close behind !” And he dashed 
across the broad roaring thoroughfare of Bridge-street, and 
hurrying almost at a run down' Tooley-street, plunged into 
the wildernesses of Bermondsey. 

He stopped at the end of a miserable blind alley, where 
a dirty gas-lamp just served to make darkness visible, and 
show the patched windows and rickety doorways of the crazy 
houses, whose upper stories were lost in a brooding cloud of 
fog; and the pools of stagnant water at our feet; and the 
huge heap of cinders which filled up the waste end of the 
alley — a dreary, black, formless mound, on which two or 
three spectral dogs prowled up and down after the oflal, ap- 
pearing and vanishing like dark imps in and out of the black 
misty chaos beyond. 

The neighborhood was undergoing, as it seemed, “ improve- 
ments,” of that peculiar metropolitan species which consists 
in pulling down the dwellings of the poor, and building up 
rich men’s houses instead ; and great buildings, within high 
temporary palings, had already eaten up half the little 
houses ; as the great fish, and the great estates, and the great 
shopkeepers, eat up the little ones of their species — by the 
law of competition, lately discovered to be the true creator 
and preserver of the universe. There they loomed up, the 
tall bullies, against the dreary sky, looking down with their 
grim, proud, stony visages, on the misery which they were 
driving out of one corner, only to accumulate and intensify it 
in another. 

The house at which we stopped was the last in the row ; 
all its companions had been pulled down ; and there it stood, 
leaning out with one naked ugly side into the gap, and 
stretching out long props, like feeble arms and crutches, to 
resist the work of demolition. 

A group of slatternly people -were in the entry, talldng 
loudly, and as Downes pushed by them, a woman seized him 
by the arm. 

“ Oh ! you unnatural villain ! — To go away after youi 
Irink, and leave all them poor dear dead corpses locked up, 
without even letting a body go in to stretch them out !” 

“ And breeding the fever, too, to poison the whole house !” . 
growled one. 

“ The relieving officer’s been here, my cove,” said another ; 
‘and he’s gone for a peeler and a search warrant to break 
open the door. I can tell you !” 


316 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


But Downes pushed past unheeding, unlocked a door at 
the end of the passage, thrust me in, locked it again, and 
then rushed across the room in chase of two or three rats, 
who vanished into cracks and holes. 

And what a room ! A low lean-to with wooden walls, 
without a single article of furniture ; and through the broad 
chinks of the floor shone up as it were ugly glaring eyes, 
staring at us. They were the reflections of the rushlight in 
the sewer below. The stench was frightful — the air heavy 
with pestilence. The first breath I drew made my heart 
sink, and my stomach turn. But I forgot every thing in the 
object which lay before me, as Downes tore a half-finished 
coat ofT three corpses laid side by side on the bare floor.' 

There was his little Irish wife ; — dead — and naked — the 
wasted white limbs gleamed in the lurid light ; the unclosed 
eyes stared, as if reproachfully, at the husband whose drunk- 
enness had brought her there to kill her with the pestilence ; 
and on each side of her a little, shriveled, impish, child 
corpse — the wretched man had laid their arms round the 
dead mother’s neck — and there they slept, their hungering 
and wailing over at last for ever : the rats had been busy al- 
ready with them — but what matter to them now ? 

“ Look !” he cried ; “ I watched ’em dying I Day after 
day I saw the devils come up through the cracks, like little 
maggots and beetles, and all manner of ugly things, creeping 
down their throats ; and I asked ’em, and they said they 
were the fever devils.” 

It was too true ; the poisonous exhalations had killed 
them. The wretched man’s delirium tremens had given that 
horrible substantiality to the poisonous fever gases. 

Suddenly Downes turned on me, almost menacingly. 
“ Money ! money ! I want some gin !” 

I was thoroughly terrified — and there was no shame in 
feeling fear, locked up with a madman far my superior in 
size and strength, in so ghastly a place. But the shame, and 
the folly too, would have been in giving way to my fear , 
and with a boldness half assumed, half the real fruit of ex- 
citement and indignation at the horrors I beheld, I ansM^ered — 

“If I had money, I would give you none. What do you 
want with gin ? Look at the fruits of your accursed tip- 
pling. If you had taken my advice, my poor fellow, I went 
on, gaining courage as I spoke, “ and become a water-drinker, 
like me — ” 

“ Curse you and your water-drinking ! If you had had no 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


317 


water to drink or wash with for two years but that — that/’ 
pointing to the foul ditch below — “ If you had emptied the 
slops in there with one hand, and filled your kettle with the 
other — ” 

“ Do you actually mean that that sewer is your only drink- 
ing water ?” 

“ Where else can we get any '? Every body drinks it ; 
and you shall, too — you shall !” he cried, with a fearful oath, 
“ and then see if you don’t run off to the gin-shop, to take 
the taste of it out of your mouth. Drink ? and who can 
help drinking, with his stomach turned with such hell-broth 
as that — or such a hell’s blast as this air is here, ready to 
vomit from morning till night with the smells ? I’ll show 
you. You shall drink a bucket full of it, as sure as you live, 
you shall.” 

And he ran out of the back door, upon a little balcony, 
which hung over the ditch. 

I tried the door, but the key was gone, and the handle too. 
I beat furiously on it, and called for help. Two grufl 
authoritative voices were heard in the passage. 

'• Let us in ; I’m the policeman !” 

“ Let me out, or mischief will happen !” 

The policeman made a vigorous thrust at the crazy door ; 
and just as it burst open, and the light of his lantern streamed 
into the horrible den, a heavy splash was heard outside. 

“ He has fallen into the ditch !” 

“ He’ll be drowned, then, as sure as he’s a born man,” 
shouted one of the crowd behind. 

We rushed out on the balcony. The light of the police- 
man’s lantern glared over the ghastly scene — along the double 
row of miserable house-backs, which lined the sides of the open 
tidal ditch — over strange rambling jetties, and balconies, and 
sleeping sheds, which hung on rotting piles over the black 
waters, with phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming 
and twinkling out of the dark hollows, like devilish gravelight.s 
— over bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, 
and lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell- 
broth — over the slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were 
dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending up, as they 
stirred, hot breaths of miasma — the only sign that a spark of 
humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last 
in that foul death. I almost fancied that I could see the 
haggard face staring up at me through the slimy water ; but 
no — it was as opaque as stone. 


318 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


I shuddered and Avent in again, to see slatternly gin-smell- 
ing women stripping off their clothes — true women even there 
—to cover the poor naked corpses ; and pointing to the 
bruises which told a tale of long tyranny and cruelty ; and 
mingling their lamentations with stories of shrieks and beat- 
ing, and children locked up for hours to starve ; and the men 
looked on sullenly, as if they too were guilty, or rushed out to 
relieve themselves by helping to find the drowned body. 
Ugh ! it was the very mouth of hell, that room. And in the 
midst of all the rout, the relieving officer stood impassive, jot- 
ing down scraps of information, and warning us to appear the 
next day, to state what we knew before the magistrates. 
Needless hypocrisy of law ! Too careless to save the woman 
and children from brutal tyranny, nakedness, starvation ! — 
Too superstitious to offend its idol of vested interests, by pro- 
tecting the poor man against his tyrants, the house-owning 
shopkeepers under whose greed the dwellings of the poor be- 
come nests of filth and pestilence, drunkenness and degrada- 
tion. Careless, superstitious, imbecile law ! — leaving the 
victims to die unhelped, and then, when the fever and the 
tyranny has done its work, in thy sanctimonious prudishness, 
drugging thy repectable conscience by a “ searching inquiry” 
as to how it all happened — lest, forsooth, there should have 
been “ foul play I” Is the knife or the bludgeon, then, the 
only foul play, and not the cesspool and the curse of Rab- 
shakeh ? Go through Bermondsey or Spitalfields, St. Giles’s 
or Lambeth, and see if there is not foul play enough already — - 
to be tried hereafter at a more av/ful coroner’s inquest than 
thou thinkest of ' 


CHAPTER XXXVI. 


DREAM LAND. 

It must have been two o’clock in the the morning before 
I reached my lodgings. Too much exhausted to think, I hur- 
ried to my bed. I remember now that I reeled strangely as 
r went up-stairs. I lay down, and was asleep in an instant. 

How long I had slept I know not, when I awoke with a 
strange confusion and whirling in my brain, and an intolera- 
ble MXMght and pain about my back and loins. By the light 
of the gas-lamp 1 saw a figure standing at the foot of my bed. 
I could not discern the face, but I knew instinctively that it 
was my mother. I called to her again and again, but she 
did not answer. She moved slowly away, and passed out 
through the wall of the room. 

I tried to follow her, but could not. An enormou.s, unut- 
terable weight seemed to lie upon me. The bed-clothes grew 
and grew before me, and upon me, into a vast mountain, mil 
lions of miles in height. Then it seemed all glowing red, like 
the cone of a volcano. I heard the roaring of the fires with- 
in, the rattling of the cinders down the heaving slope. A 
river ran from its summit ; and up that river-bed it seemed I 
was doomed to climb and climb forever, millions and millions 
of miles upwards, against the rushing stream. The thought 
was intolerable, and I shrieked aloud. A raging thirst had 
seized me. I tried to drink the river-water, but it was boil- 
ing hot — sulphureous — reeking of putrefaction. Suddenly I 
fancied that I could pass round the foot of the mountain ; 
and jumbling, as madmen will, the sublime and the ridiculous, 
I sprang up to go round the foot of my bed, which was the 
mountain. 

I recollect lying on the floor. I recollect the people of the 
‘house, who had been awoke by my shriek and my fall, rush- 
rig in and calling to me. I could not rise or answer. I 
recollect a doctor ; and talk about brain fever and delirium 
It was true. I was in a raging fever. And my fancy long 
pent-up and crushed by circumstances, burst out in uncontroll- 
able wildness, and swept my other faculties with it helpless 
away, over all heaven and earth, presenting to me, as in a 
vast kaleidoscope, fantaslic symbols of all I had ever thought, 
or read, or felt. 


320 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


That fancy of the mountain returned ; hut I had climbed 
it now. I was wandering along the lower ridge of the Him- 
alaya. On my right the line of snow peaks showed like a 
rosy saw against the clear blue morning sky. Raspberries 
and cyclamens were peeping through the snow around me. 
As I looked down the abysses, I could see far below, througli 
the thin vails of blue mist that wandered in the glens, the 
silver spires of giant deodars, and huge rhododendrons that 
glowed like trees of flame. The longing of my life to behold 
that cradle of mankind was satisfied. My eyes reveled in vasL 
ness, as they swept over the broad, flat jungle at the mount- 
ain foot, a desolate sheet of dark gigantic grasses, furrowed 
with the paths of the buffalo and rhinoceros, with barren 
sandy water courses, desolate pools, and here and there a 
single tree, stunted with malaria, shattered by mountain 
fi(n)ds ; and far beyond, the vast plains of Hindoostan, enlaced 
with myriad silver rivers and canals, tanks and rice-fields, 
cities with their mosques and minarets, gleaming among the 
stately palm-groves along the boundless horizon. Above me 
was a Hindoo temple, cut out of the yellow sandstone. I 
climbed up to the higher tier of pillars among monstrous 
shapes of gods and fiends, that mouthed and writhed and 
mocked at me, struggling to free themselves from their bed 
of rock. The bull Nundi rose and tried to gore me ; hundred- 
handed gods brandished quoits and sabres round my head ; 
and Kali dropped the skull from her gore-dripping jaws, to 
clutcli me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing 
the pillars of the portico, bent them like reeds : an earthquake 
shook the hills — great sheets of woodland slid roaring and 
crashing into the valleys — a tornado swept through the tem- 
ple hails, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm : 
a crash — a cloud of yellow dust which filled the air — choked 
me — blinded me — buried me — 


And Eleanor came by, and took my soul in the palm of her 
hand, as the angels did Faust’s, and carried it to a cavern by 
the sea-side, and dropped it in ; and I fell and fell for ages*. 
And all the velvet mosses, rock flowers, and sparkling spars 
and ores, fell with me, round me, in showers of diamonds, 
whirlwinds of emerald and ruby, and pattered into the sea 
that moaned below, and were quenched ; and the light lessen- 
ed above me to one small spark, and vanished; and I was in 

darkness, and turned again to my dust 

And I was at the lowest point of created life ; a madrepore 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


321 


rooted to the rock, fathoms beloAv the tide-mark ; and worst 
of all, my individuality was gone, I was not one thing, but 
many things — a crowd of innumerable polypi ; and I grew 
and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and mul- 
tiplied thousand and ten thousand-fold. If I could have 
thought, I should have gone mad at it ; but I could only 
feel. 

And I heard Eleanor and Lillian talking, as they floated 
past me through the deep, for they were two angels ; and 
Lillian said, “ When will he be one again?” 

And Eleanor said, “ He who falls from the golden ladder 
must climb through ages to its top. He who tears himself in 
pieces by his lusts, ages only can make him one again. The 
madrepore shall become a shell, and the shell a fish, and the 
lish a bird, and the bird a beast ; and then he shall become a 
man again, and see the glory of the latter days.” 

And I was a soft crab, under a stone on the sca-.shore. 
With infinite starvation, and struggling, and kicking, I had 
got rid of my armor, shield by shield, and joint by joint, and 
cowered, naked and pitiable, in the dark, among dead shells 
and ooze. Suddenly the stone was turned up ; and there was 
my cousin’s hated face laughing at me, and pointing me out 
to Lillian. She laughed too, as 1 looked up, sneaking, 
ashamed, and defenseless, and squared up at him with my 
soft, useless claws. Why should she not laugh ? Are not 
crabs, and toads, and monkeys, and a hundred other strange 
forms of animal life, jests of nature — embodiments of a divine 
humor, at which men are meant to laugh and be merry 
But alas ! my cousin, as he turned away, thrust the stone 
back with his foot, and squelched me flat 

And I was a remora, weak and helpless, till I could attach 
myself to some living thing ; and then I had power to stop 
the largest ship. And Lillian was a flying-fish, and skimmed 
over the crests of the waves on gauzy wings. And my cousin 
was a huge shark, rushing after her, greedy and open-mouthed ; 
and I saw her danger, and clung to him, and held him back; 
and just as I had stopped him, she turned and swam back 
into his open jaws 

Sand — sand — nothing but sand ! The air was full of sand, 
drifting over granite temples, and painted kings and triumphs, 
and the skulls of a former world ; and I was an ostrich, flying 
madly before the simoon wind, and the giant sand pillars, 
which stalked across the plains, hunting me down. And 

o* 


322 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Lillian was an Amazon queen, beautiful, and cold, and cmel ; 
and she rode upon a charmed horse, and carried behind her on 
her saddle a spotted ounce, which was my cousin ; and, when 
I came near her, she made him leap down and course me. 
And we ran for miles and for days through the interminable 
sand, till he sprung on me, and dragged me down. And as I 
lay quivering and dying, she reined in her horse above me, 
and looked down on me with beautiful, pitiless eyes; and a 
wild Arab tore the plumes from my wings, and she took them 
and wreathed them in her golden hair. The broad and blood- 
red sun sank down beneath the sand, and the horse and the 
Amazon and the ostrich plumes shone blood-red in his lurid 
rays 

1 was a mylodon among South American forests — a vast 
sleepy mass, my elephantine limbs and yard-long talons con- 
trasting strangely with the little meek rabbit’s head, furnished 
with a poor dozen of clumsy grinders, and a very small kernel 
of brains, whose highest consciousness was the enjoyment of 
muscular strength. Where I had picked up the sensation 
which my dreams realized for me, I know not : my waking 
life, alas! had never given me experience of it. Has the 
mind powder of creating sensations for itself? Surely it does 
so, in those delicious dreams about flying which haunt us poot 
wingless mortals, which would seem to give my namesake’s 
philosophy the lie. However that may be, intense and new 
was the animal delight, to plant my hinder claws at some 
tree-foot deep into the black, rotting, vegetable-mould which 
steamed rich gases up wherever it was pierced, and clasp rny 
huge arms round the stem of some palm or tree-fern ; anu 
then slowly bring my enormous weight and muscle to bear 
upon it, till the stem bent like a withe, and the laced banc 
cracked, and the fibres groaned and shrieked, and the roots 
sprung up out of the soil ; and then, with a slow circular 
wrench, the whole tree was twisted bodily out of the ground., 
and the maddening tenison of my muscles suddenly relaxed, 
and I sank sleepily down upon the turf, to browse upon the 
crisp, tart foliage, and fall asleep in the glare of sunshine 
which streamed through the new gap in the green forest roof. 
Much as I had envied the strong, I had never before suspect- 
ed the delight of mere physical exertion. I now understood 
the wild gambols of the dog, and the madness which maaes 
ihe horse gallop and strain onward till he drops and dies. 
They fulfill their nature, as I was doing, and in that is 
always happiness. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


323 


But I did more — whether from mere animal destructive- 
ness, or from the spark of humanity which was slowly re- 
kindling ill me, I began to delight in tearing up trees, for its 
own sake. I tried my strength daily on thicker and thicker 
boles. I crawled up to the high palm-tops, and bowed them 
down by my weight. My path through the forest was mark • 
ed, like that of a tornado, by snapped and prostrate stems 
and withering branches. Had I been a few degrees more 
human, I might have expected a retribution for my sin. I 
had fractured my own skull three or four times already. I 
used often to pass the carcasses of my race, killed, as geolo- 
gists now find them, by the fall of the trees they had over- 
thrown; but still I went on, more and more reckless, a slave, 
like many a so-called man, to the mere sense of power. 

One day I wandered to the margin of the woods, and 
climbing a tree, surveyed a prospect new to me. For miles 
and miles, away to the white line of the smoking Cordillera, 
stretched a low rolling plain ; one vast thistle bed, the down 
of which flew in gray gauzy clouds before a soft fitful breeze; 
innumerable finches fluttered and pecked above it, and bent 
the countless flower-heads. Far away, one tall tree rose 
above the level thistle-ocean. A strange longing seized me 
to go and tear it dowm. The forest leaves seemed tasteless ; 
my stomach sickened at them ; nothing but that tree would 
satisfy me : and descending, I slowly brushed my way, with 
half-shut eyes, through the tali thistles which buried even ray 
bulk. 

At last, after days of painful crawling, I dragged my un- 
wieldiness to the tree-fboj^ Around it the plain was bare, 
and scored by burrows and heaps of earth, among which 
gold, some in dust, some in great knots and ingots, sparkled 
every where in the sun, in fearful contrast to the skulls and 
bones which lay bleaching round. Some were human, some 
were those of vast and monstrous beasts. I knew (one knows 
every thing in dreams) that they had been slain by the wing- 
ed ants, as large as panthers, who snufled and watched 
around over the magic treasure. Of them I felt no fear ; 
and they seemed not to perceive me, as I crawled, with 
greedy, hunger-sharpened eyes, up to the foot of the tree. It 
seemed miles in height. Its stem was bare and polished like 
a palm’s, and above a vast feathery crown of dark green vel- 
vet slept in the still sunlight. But, wonder of wonders ' 
from among the branches hung great sea-green lilies, and, 
nestled in the heart of each of them, the bust of a beautiful 


324 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


girl. Their white bosoms and shoulders gleamed losy* white 
against the emerald petals, like conch-shells half-hidden among 
sea-weeds, while their delicate waists melted mysteriously into 
the central sanctuary of the flower. Their long arms and 
golden tresses waved languishingly downward in the breeze ; 
their eyes glittered like diamonds ; their breaths perfumed 
the air. A blind ecstasy seized me — I awoke again to hu- 
manity, and fiercely clasping the tree, shook and tore at it, in 
the blind hope of bringing nearer to me the magic beauties 
above : for 1 knew that I was in the famous land of Wak- 
Wak, from which the Eastern merchants used to pluck those 
flower-born beauties, and bring them home to fill the harems 
of the Indian kings. Suddenly I heard a rustling in the 
thistles behind me, and looking round, saw again that dreaded 
face — my cousin ! 

He was dressed — strange jumble that dreams are ! like an 
American backwoodsman. He carried the same revolver and 
bowie-knife which he had showed me the fatal night that he 
intruded on the Chartist club. I shook with terror, but he, 
too, did not see me. He threw himself on his knees, and 
began fiercely digging and scraping for the gold. 

The winged ants rushed on him, but ho looked up, and 
“ held them with his glittering eye,” and they shrank back 
abashed into the thistle covert ; while I strained and tugged 
on, and the faces of the dryads above grew sadder and older, 
and their tears fell on me like a fragrant rain. 

Suddenly the tree-bole cracked — it was tottering. I looked 
round, and saw that my cousin knelt directly in the path of 
its fall. I tried to call to him to move ; but how could a 
poor edentate like myself articulate a word ? T tried to catch 
his attention by signs — he would not see. I tried, convul- 
sively, to hold the tree up, but it was too late, a sudden gust 
of air swept by, and down it rushed, with a roar like a whirl- 
wind, and leaving my cousin untouched, struck me full across 
the loins, broke my backbone, and pinned me to the ground 
in mortal agony. I heard one wild shriek rise from the flower 
fairies, as they fell each from the lily cup, no longer of full 
human size, but withered, shriveled, diminished a thousand- 
fold, and lay on the bare sand, like little rosy humming-birds’ 
eggs, all crushed and dead. 

The great blue heaven above me spoke, and cried, “Selfish 
and sense-bound ! thou hast murdered beauty !” 

The sighing thistle-ocean answered, and murmured, “ Dis- 
contented ! thou hast murdered beauty !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


325 


One flower fairy alone lifted up her tiny cheek from the 
ffold-strewn sand, and cried, “ Presumptuous ! thou has mur- 
dered beauty !” 

It was Lillian’s face — Lillian’s voice ! My cousin heard it 
too, and turned eagerly ; and as my eyes closed in the last death- 
shiver, I saw him coolly pick up the little beautiful figure, 
which looked like a fragment of some exquisite cameo, and 
deliberately put it away in his cigar-case, as he said to him- 
self “ A charming tit-bit for me, when I return from the dig- 
gings !” 

When I awoke again, I was a baby- ape in Borneon forests, 
perched among fragrant trailers and fantastic orchis flowers ; 
and as I looked down, beneath the green roof, into the clear 
waters paved with unknown water-lilies on which the sun 
had never shone, I saw my face reflected in the pool — a mel- 
ancholy, thoughtful countenance, with large projecting brow' — 
it might have been a negro child’s. And I felt stirring in me 
germs of a new and higher consciousness — yearnings of love 
toward the mother ape, who fed me and carried me from tree 
to tree. But I grew and grew ; and then the weight of my 
destiny fell upon me. I saw year by year my brow recede, 
my neck enlarge, my jaw protrude; my teeth became tusks; 
skinny wattles grew from my cheeks — the animal faculties in 
me were swallowing up the intellectual. I watched in my- 
self, with stupid self-disgust, the fearful degradation which 
goes on from youth to age in all the monkey race, especially 
in those which approach nearest to the human form. Long 
melancholy mopings, fruitless strugglings to think, were peri- 
odically succeeded by wild frenzies, agonies of lust and aim- 
less ferocity. I flew upon my brother apes, and was driven 
oft" with wounds. I rushed howling down into the village 
gardens, destroying every thing I met. I caught the birds 
and insects, and tore them to pieces with savage glee. One 
day, as I sat among the boughs, I saw Lillian coming along 
a flowery path — decked as Eve might have been, the day she 
turned from Paradise. The skins of gorgeous birds were 
round her waist ; her hair was wreathed with fragrant tropic 
flowers. On her bosom lay a baby — it was my cousin’s. I 
knew her, and hated her. The madness came upon me. I 
longed to leap from the bough and tear her limb from limb ; 
but brutal terror, the dread of man which is the doom of beasts, 
kept me rooted to my place. Then my cousin came — a hunter 
missionary ; and I heard him talk to her with pride of the 
new world of civilization and Christianity which he ^yas organ- 


326 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


izing in that tropic wilderness. I listened with a dim jealous 
understanding — not of the words, but of the facts. I saw’ 
them instinctively, as in a dream. She pointed up to me in 
terror and disgust, as I sat gnashing and gibbering overhead. 
He threw’ up the muzzle of his rifle carelessly, and fired — I 
fell dead, but conscious still. I knew that my carcase W’as 
carried to the settlement; and I watched while a smirking, 
chuckling surgeon, dissected me, bone by bone, and nerve by 
nerve. And as he was fingering at my heart, and discoursing 
sneeringly about Van Helmont’s dreams of the Archteus, and 
the animal spirit which dw’ells within the solar plexus, Elea- 
nor glided by again, like an angel, and threw my soul out ol 
the knot of nerves, with one velvet finger-tip 

Child-dreams — more vague and fragmentary than my ani- 
mal ones ; and yet more calm and simple, and gradually, as 
they led me onward through a new life, ripening into detail, 
coherence, and reflection. Dreams of a hut among the valleys 
of Thibet — the young of forest animals, wild cats, and dogs, 
and fowls, brought home to be my playmates, and grow up 
tame around me. Snow’-peaks which glittered white against 
the nightly sky, barring in the horizon of the narrow valley, 
and yet seeming to beckon upward, outw’ard. Strange un- 
spoken aspirations — instincts w’hich pointed to unfulfilled pow'’- 
ers, a mighty destiny. A sense, awful and yet cheering, of a 
wonder and a majesty, a presence and a voice around, in the 
clifl's and the pine forests, and the great blue rainless heaven. 
The music of loving voices, the sacred names of child and 
father, mother, brother, sister, first of all inspirations. Had 
we not an All-Father, whose eyes looked down upon us from 
among those stars above ; whose hand upheld the mountain 
roots below us ? Did He not love us, too, even as w’e loved 
each otlicr ? 

The noise of wheels crushing slowly through meadows of 
tall marigolds and asters, orchises and fragrant lilies. I lay, 
a child, upon a woman’s bosom. Was she my mother, or 
Eleanor, or Lillian ? Or was she neither, and yet all — some 
ideal of the great Arian tribe, containing in herself all future 
types of European women ? So I slept and woke, and slept 
again, day after day, week after week, in the lazy bullock- 
wagon, among herds of gray-cattle, guarded by huge lop-eared 
mastifis; among shaggy white horses, heavy-horned sheep, and 
silky goats ; among tall bare-lirnbed men, with stone axes on 
their shoulders, and horn bows at their backs. Westward, 
through the boundless steppes, whither or why we knew not; 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


327 


but that the All-Father had sent ns forth. And behind us, 
the rosy snow peaks died into ghastly gray, lower and lower 
as every evening came ; and before us the plains spread infi- 
nite, with gleaming salt-lakes, and ever fresh tribes of gaudy 
flowers. Behind us dark lines of living beings streamed down 
the mountain slopes ; around us 'dark lines crawled along the 
plains — all westward, westward ever — the tribes of the Holy 
Mountain poured out like water to replenish the earth and 
subdue it — lava streams from the crater of that great soul- 
volcano — Titan babies, dumb angels of God, bearing with 
them in their unconscious pregnancy, the law, the freedom, 
the science, the poetrj', the Christianity, of Europe and the 
world. 

Westward ever — who could stand against us ? We met the 
wild asses on the steppe, and tamed them, and made them 
our slaves. We slew the bison herds, and swam broad rivers 
on their skins. The Python snake lay across our path ; the 
wolves and the wild dogs snarled at us out of their coverts ; 
we slew them and went on. The forest rose in black tangled 
barriers ; we hewed our way through them and went on. 
Strange giant tribes met us, and eagle-visaged hordes, fierce 
and foolish ; we smote them hip and thigh, and went on, 
westward ever. Days and weeks and months rolled on, and 
our wheels rolled on with them. New Alps rose up before us ; 
we climbed and climbed them, till, in lonely glens, the mount- 
ain wails stood up and barred our path. 

Then one arose and said, “ Rocks are strong, but the All- 
Father is stronger. Let us pray to him to send the earth- 
quakes, and blast the mountains asunder.” 

So Vv*e sat down and prayed, but the earthquake did not 
come. 

Then another arose and said, “ Rocks are strong, but the 
All-Father is stronger. If we are the children of the All- 
Father, we, too, are stronger than the rocks. Let us portion 
out the valley, to every man an equal plot of ground ; and 
bring out the sacred seeds, and sow, and build, and come 
up with me and bore the mountain.” 

And all said, “ It is the voice of God. We will go up with 
thee, and bore the mountain ; and thou shalt be our king, for 
thou art wisest, and the spirit of the All-Father is on thee ; 
and whosoever will not go up with thee shall die as a coward 
and an idler.” 

So we went up ; and in the morning we bored the mount 
ain, and at night we came down and tilled the ground, and 


328 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOK AND POET. 


sowed wheat and barley, and planted orchards. And in the 
upper glens we met the mining dwarfs, and saw their tools 
of iron and copper, and their rock-houses and forges, and envied 
them. But they would give us none of them : then our king 
said, 

“ The All-Father has given all things and all wisdom. 
Woe to him who keeps them to himself : we will teach you 
to sow the sacred seeds ; and do you teach us your smith- work, 
or you die.” * 

Then the dwarfs taught us smith- work ; and w'e loved them, 
for they were wise ; and they married our sons and daughters ; 
and we went on boring the mountain. 

Then some of us arose and said, We are stronger than 
our brethren, and can till more ground than they. Give us a 
greater portion of land, to each according to his power.” 

But the king said, “ Wherefore ? that ye may eat and drink 
more than your brethren ? Have you larger stomachs, as well 
as stronger arms ? As much as a man needs for himself, 
that he may do for himself. The rest is the gift of the All- 
Father, and we must do his work therewith. For the sake 
of the women and the children, for the sake of the sick and 
the aged, let him that is stronger go up and w'ork the 
harder at the mountain.” And all men said, “It is well 
spoken.” 

So w^e were all equal — for none took more than he needed ; 
and we were all free, because we loved to obey the king by 
wdrom the spirit spoke ; and we were all brothers, because we 
had one w’ork, and one hope, and one All-Father. 

But I grew up to be a man ; and tw^enty years w'ere passed, 
and the mountain w'as not bored through ; and the king grew’ 
old, and men began to love their flocks and herds better than 
quarrying, and they gave up boring through the mountain. 
And the strong and the cunning said, “ What can w’e do with 
all this might of ours V' So, because they had no other way 
of employing it, they turned it against each other, and sw’al- 
low’ed up the heritage of the weak : and a few grew rich, and 
many poor ; and the valley was filled with sorrow’, for the 
land became too narrow for them. 

ITien I arose and said, “ How is this ?” And they said, 
“ We must make provision for our children.” 

And I answered, “The All-Father meant neither you nor 
your children to devour your brethren. Why do you not 
break up rnore waste ground ? Why do you not try to grow 
more corn in your fields ?” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 329 

And they answered, “ We till the ground as our forefathers 
did • w^e will keep to the old traditions.” 

And I answered, “ Oh ye hypocrites ! have ye not forgotten 
the old traditions, that each man should have his equal share 
of ground, and that we should go on working at the mountain, 
for the sake of the weak and the children, the fatherless and 
the widow I” 

And they answered naught for a while. 

Then one said, “ Are we not better off as we are ? We buy 
the poor man’s ground for a price, and we pay him his wages 
for tilling it for us — and we know better how to manage it 
than he.” 

And I said, “Oh ye hypocrites ! See how your lie works! 
Those who were free are now slaves. Those who had peace 
of mind are now anxious from day to day for their daily bread. 
And the multitude gets poorer and poorer, while ye grow fat- 
ter and fatter. If ye had gone on boring the mountain, ye 
would have had no time to eat up your brethren.” 

Then they laughed and said, “Thou art a singer of songs, 
and a dreamer of dreams. Let those who want to get through 
the mountain go up and bore it ; we are well enough here. 
Come now, sing us pleasant songs, and talk no more foolish 
dreams, and we wdll reward thee.” 

Then they brought out a vailed maiden, and said, “Look! 
her feet are like ivory, and her hair like threads of gold ; and 
she is the sweetest singer in the whole valley. And she shall 
be thine, if thou wilt be like other people, and prophesy smooth 
things unto us, and torment us no more with talk about lib- 
erty, equality, and brotherhood ; for they never were, and never 
will be, on this earth. Living is too hard work to give in to 
such fancies.” 

And when the maiden’s vail was lifted, it w’as Lillian. 
And she clasped me round the neck, and cried, “ Come ! I 
will be your bride, and you shall be rich and powerful ; and 
all men .shall speak well of you, and you shall write songs, and 
we will sing them together, and feast and play from dawn to 
dawn.” 

And I wept ; and turned me about, and cried, “ Wife and 
child, song and wealth, are pleasant ; but blessed is the w’ork 
which the All-Father has given the people to do. Let the 
maimed and the halt and the blind, the needy and the father- 
less, come up after me, and we will bore the mountain.” 

But the rich drove me out, and drove back those who would 
have followed me. So I went up by myself, and bored the 


220 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


mountain seven years, weeping ; and every year Lillian came 
to me, and said, “Come, and be my husband, for my beauty is 
fading, and youth passes fast away.” But I set my heart 
steadfastly to the work. 

And when seven years were over, the poor were so multi- 
plied, that the rich had not wherewith to pay their labor. 
And there cume a famine in the land, and many of the poor 
died. Then the rich said, “if we let these men starve, they 
will turn on us, and kill us, for hunger has no conscience, and 
they are all but like the beasts that perish.” So they all 
brought, one a bullock, another a sack of meal, each according 
to his substance, and fed the poor therewith ; and said to them, 
“Behold our love and mercy toward you!” But the more 
they gave, the less they had wherewithal to pay their labor- 
ers ; and the more they gave, the less the poor liked to work ; 
so that at last they had not wherewithal to pay for tilling the 
ground, and each man had to go and till his own, and knew 
not how ; so the land lay waste, and there was great per- 
plexity. 

Then I went down to them and said, “ if you had heark- 
ened to me, and not robbed your brethren of their land, you 
would never have come into this strait; for by this time the 
mountain would have been bored through.” 

Then they cursed the mountain, and me, and Him who 
made them, and came down to my cottage at night, and cried, 
“ One-sided and left-handed ! father of confusion, and disciple 
of dead donkeys, see to what thou hast brought the land, with 
thy blasphemous doctrines ! Here we are starving, and not 
only we, but the poor misguided victims of thy abominable 
notions !” 

“ You have beeome wondrous pitiful to the poor,” said 1, 
“ since you found that they would not starve that you might 
wanton.” 

Then once more Lillian came to me, thin and pale and 
worn. “ See, I, too, am starving ! and you have been the cause 
of it ; but I will forgive all if you will help us but this once.” 

“ How shall I help you ?” 

“ You are a poet and an orator, and win over all hearts 
with your talk and your songs. Go down to the tribes of the 
plain, and persuade them to send us up warriors, that we may 
put down these riotous and idle wretches ; and you shall be king 
of all the land, and I will be your slave, by day and night.” 

But I went out, and quarried steadfastly at the mountain. 

And when I came back the next evening, the poor had 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


331 


risen against the rich, one and all, crying, “As you have done 
to us, so will we do to you and they hunted them down like 
wild beasts, and slew many of them, and threw their carcases 
on the dunghill, and took possession of their land and houses, 
and cried, “ We will he all free and equal as our. forefathers 
were, and live here, and eat and drink, and take our pleasure.” 

Then 1 ran out, and cried to them, “ Fools ! will you do 
as these rich did, and neglect the work of God ? If you do 
to them as they have done to you, you will sin as they sinned, 
and devour each other at the last, as they devoured you. 
The old paths are best. Let each man, rich or poor, have 
his equal share of the land, as it was at first, and go up and 
dig through the mountain, and possess the good land beyond, 
where no man need jostle his neighbor, or rob him, when the 
land becomes too small for you. Were the rich only in fault ? 
Did not you, too, neglect the work which the All-Father had 
given you, and run every man after his own comfort ? So 
you entered into a lie, and by your own sin raised up the 
rich men to be your punishment. For the last time, who 
will go up with me to the mountain ?” 

Then they all cried with one voice, “ We have sinned I 
We will go up and pierce the mountain, and fulfill the work 
which God set to our forefathers.” 

We went up, and the first stroke that 1 struck, a crag fell 
out ; and behold, the light of day ! and far below us the good 
land and large, stretching away boundless toward the west- 
ern sun 

I sat by the cave’s mouth at the dawning of the day 
Past me the tribe poured down, young and old, with their 
wagons, and their cattle, their seeds, and their arms, as of 
old — yet not as of old — wiser and stronger, taught by long 
labor and sore affliction. Downward they streamed from 
ihe cave’s mouth into the glens, following the guidance of 
the silver water-courses ; and as they passed me, each kissed 
my hands and feet, and cried, “ Thou hast saved us — thou 
hast given up all for us. Come and be our king !” 

“ Nay,” 1 said, “ I have been your king this many a year ; 
for I have been the servant of you all.” 

I went down with them into the plain, and called them 
round me. Many times they besought me to go with them 
and lead them. 

“ No,” I said ; * ‘ I am old and gray-headed, and 1 am not 
as I have been. Choose out the wisest and most righteous 
among you, and let him lead you. But bind him to your 


332 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

selves with an oath, that whenever he shall say to you, ‘ Stay 
here, and let us sit down and build, and dwell here forever,’ 
you shall cast him out of his office, and make him a hewer 
of wood and a drawer of water, and choose one who will lead 
you forward in the spirit of God.” 

The crow’d opened, and a woman came forward into the 
circle. Her face was vailed, but we all knew her for a 
prophetess. Slowly she stepped into the midst, chanting a 
mystic song. Whether it spoke of past, present, or future, 
we knew not ; but it sank deep into all our hearts. 

“ True freedom stands in meekness — 

True strength in utter weakness — 

Justice in forgiveness lies — 

Riches in self-sacrifice — 

Own no rank but God’s own spirit — 

Wisdom rule ! — and worth inherit ! 

Work for all, and all employ — 

Share with all, and all enjoy — 

God alike to all has given, 

Heaven as Earth, and Earth as Heaven, 

When the land shall find her king again, 

And the reign of God is come.” 

We all listened awe-struck. She turned to us and con- 
tinued, 

“ Hearken to me, children of Japhet, the unresting! 

“ On the holy mountain of Paradise, in the Asgard of the 
Hindoo-Koh, in the cup of the four rivers, in the womb of 
the mother of nations, in brotherhood, equality, and freedom, 
the sons of men were begotten, at the wedding of the heaven 
and the earth. Mighty infants, you did the right you knew' 
not of, and sinned not, because there was no temptation. By 
selfishness you fell, and became beasts of prey. Each man 
coveted the universe for his own lusts, and not that he might 
fulfill in it God’s command to people and subdue it. Long 
have you wandered — and long will you wander still. For 
here you have no abiding city. You shall build cities, and 
they shall crumble ; you shall invent forms of society and 
religion, and they shall fail in the hour of need. You shall 
call the lands by your own names, and fresh waves of men 
shall sweep you forth, wcstw'ard, Avestward ever, till you have 
traveled round the path of the sun, to the place from whence 
you came. For out of Paradise you w^nt, and unto Paradise 
you shall return ; you shall become once more as little chil- 
dren, and renew your youth like the eagle’s. Feature by 
feature, and limb by limb ye shall renew it; age after age 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


S33 


gradually and painfully, by hunger and pestilence, by super- 
stitions and tyrannies, by need and blank despair, shall you 
be driven back to the All-Father’s home, till you become as 
you were before you fell, and left the likeness of your father 
for the likeness of the beasts. Out of Paradise you came, 
from liberty, equality, and brotherhood, and unto them you 
shall return again. You went forth in unconscious infancy — • 
you shall return in thoughtful manhood. You went forth in 
ignorance and need — you shall return in science and wealth, 
philosophy and art. You went forth with the world a wil- 
derness before you — you shall return when it is a garden be- 
hind you. You went forth selfish savages — you shall return 
as the brothers of the Son of God. 

“ And for you,” she said, looking on me, “your penance is 
accomplished. You have learned what it is to be a man. 
You have lost your life and saved it. He that gives up 
house, or land, or wife, or child, for God’s sake, it shall be 
repaid him an hundred-fold. Awake I” 

Surely I knew that voice ! She lifted her vail. The face 
was Lillian’s 1 No ! — Eleanor’s ! 

Gently she touched my hand — I sank down into soft 
weary, happy sleep. 

The spell was snapped. My fever and my dreams faded 
away together, and I woke to the twittering of the sparrows, 
and the scent of the poplar leaves, and the sights and sounds 
of my childhood, and found Eleanor and her uncle sitting by 
my bed, and with them Crossthwaite’s little wife. 

I would have spoken, but Eleanor laid her finger on her 
lipS; and taking her uncle’s arm, glided from the room. Katie 
kept stubbornly a smiling silence, and I was fain to obey my 
new-found guardian angels. 

What need of many words? Slowly, and with relapses 
into insensibility, I passed, like one who recovers from drown- 
ing, through the painful gate of birth into another life. Tho 
fury of passion had been replaced by a delicious weakness. 
The thunder-clouds had passed roaring dowm the wind, and 
the calm, bright, holy evening was come. My heart, like a 
fretful child, had stamped and wept itself to sleep. I was 
past even gratitude ; infinite submission and humility, feel- 
ings too long forgotten, absorbed my whole being. Only, I 
never dared meet Eleanor’s eye. Her voice was like an 
angel’s when she spoke to me — friend, mother, sister, all in 
one. But I had a dim recollection of being unjust to her — 
of some bar between us. 


334 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Katie and Crossthwaite, as they sat by me, t3nder and 
careful nurses both, told me in time, that to Eleanor I owed 
all my comforts. I could not thank her — the debt was 
infinite, inexplicable. I felt as if I must speak all my heart 
or none ; and I watched her lavish kindness with a sort of 
sleepy, passive wonder, like a new-born babe. 

At last, one day, my kind nurses allowed me to speak a 
little. I broached to Crossthwaite the subject which filled 
my thoughts. “ How came I here ? How came you here ? 
^nd Lady Ellerton 'I What is the meaning of it all ?” 

“ The meaning is, that Lady Ellerton, as they call her, is 
an angel out of heaven. Ah, Alton ! she was your true 
friend, after all, if you had but known it, and not that other 
one at all.” 

I turned my head away. 

“ Whisht — howld then, Johnny darlint : and don’t go tor 
menting the poor dear sowl, just when he’s cornin’ round 
again.” 

“ No, no ! tell me all. I must — I ought—I deserve to 
bear it. How did she come here ?” 

“ Why then, it’s my belief, she had her eye on you ever 
since you came out of that Bastile, and before that, too ; and 
she found you out at Mackaye’s, and me with you, for I was 
there looking after you. If it hadn’t been for your illness. I’d 
have been in Texas now, with our friends, for all’s up with 
the Charter, and the country’s too hot, at least for me. I’m 
sick of the w'hole thing together, patriots, aristocrats, and 
every body else, except this blessed angel. And I’ve got a 
couple of hundred to emigrate with; and what’s more, so 
have you.” 

“ How’s that ?” 

“ Why, when poor dear old Mackaye's will was read, and 
you raving mad in the next room, he had left all his stock-in- 
trade, that was, the books, to some of our friends, to form a 
M^orkmen’s library with, and £400 he’d saved, to be parted 
between you and me, on condition that we’d G. T.T., and 
cool down across the Atlantic, for seven years come the tenth 
of April.” 

So then, by the lasting love of my adopted father, I was at 
present at least out of the reach of want ! My heart was 
ready to overflow at my eyes ; but I could not rest till I had 
heard more of Lady Ellerton. What brought her here, to 
nurse me as if she had been a sister ? 

Why, then, she lives not far ofi’ by. When her husband 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


835 


died, Ins cousin got the estate and title, and so she came, Katie 
tells me, and lived for one year down somewhere in the East- 
end among the needlewomen ; and spent her whole fortune 
on the poor, and never kept a servant, so they say, but made 
her own bed and cooked her own dinner, and got her bread 
with her own needle, to see what it was really like. And 
she learnt a lesson there, I can tell you, and God bless her 
lor it. For now she’s got a large house hereby, with fifty or 
more in it, all at work together, sharing the earnings among 
themselves, and putting into their own pockets the profits, 
which would have gone to their tyrants ; and she keeps the 
accounts for them, and gets the goods sold, and manages 
every thing, and reads to them while they work, and teaches 
them every day.” 

“And takes her victuals with them,” said Katie, “share 
and share alike. She that was so grand a lady to demane 
herself to the poor unfortunate young things ! She’s as blessed 
a saint as any a one in the Calendar, if they’ll forgive me for 
saying so.” 

“ Ay ! demeaning, indeed ! for the best of it is, they’re not the 
respectable ones only, though she spends hundreds on them — ” 

“ And sure, haven’t I seen it with my own eyes, when I’ve 
been there charring V ’ 

“ Ay, but those she lives with are the fallen and the lost 
ones — those that the rich would not set up in business, or help 
them to emigrate, or lift them out of the gutter with a pair 
of tongs, for fear they should stain their own whitewash in 
handling them.” 

“ And sure they’re as dacent as meself now, the poor dar 
lints I It was misery druv ’em to it, every one; perhaps it 
might hav’ druv me the same way if I’d a lot o’ childer, and 
Johnny gone to glory — and the blessed saints save him from 
that same at all at all !” 

“ What ! from going to glory ?’ said John. 

“ Och, thin, and wouldn’t I just go mad if ever such ill 
luck happened to yees as to be taken to heaven in the prime 
of your days, asthore V’ 

And she began sobbing, and hugging, and kissing the lit- 
tle man ; and then suddenly recollecting herself, scolded him 
heartily for making such a “ whillybaloo,” and thrust him out 
of mv room, to re-conimence kissing him in the next, leaving 
me to many meditations. 


CHAPTER XXXVIT. 


THE TRUE DEMAGOGUE. 

I USED to try to arrange my thoughts, but could not ; the 
past seemed swept away and buried, like the wreck of some 
drowned land after a flood. Plowed by affliction to the core, 
my heart lay fallow for every seed that fell. Eleanor un- 
derstood me, and gently and gradually, beneath her skillful 
hand, the chaos began again to bloom with verdure. She 
and Crossthwaite used to sit and read to me — from the Bible, 
from poets, from every book which could suggest soothing, 
graceful, or hopeful fancies. Now, out of the stillness of the 
darkened chamber, one or two priceless sentences of a Kernpis, 
or a spirit-stirring Hebrew psalm, would fall upon my car : 
and then there was silence again ; and 1 was left to brood 
over the words in vacancy, till they became a fibre of my own 
soul’s core. Again and again the stories of Lazarus and the 
Magdalene alternated with Milton’s Penseroso, or with Words 
worth’s tenderest and most solemn strains. Exquisite prints 
from the history of our Lord’s life and death were hung one 
by one, each "for a few days, opposite my bed, where they 
might catch my eye the moment that I woke, the moment 
before I fell asleep. I heard one day the good dean remon- 
strating with her on the “sentimentalism” of her mode of 
treatment. 

“Poor drowned butterfly!” she answered, smiling, “ho 
must be fed with honey-dew. Have I not surely had practice 
enough already ?” 

“ Yes, angel that you are !” answered the old man, “You 
have indeed had practice enough !” and lifting her hand 
reverentially to his lips, he turned and left the room. 

She sat down by me as I lay, and began to read from 
Tennyson’s Lotus-Eaters. But it was not reading — it was 
rather a soft dreamy chant, which rose and fell like the waves 
of sound on an jEolian harp. 

“ There is sweet music here that softer falls 
Than petals from blown roses on the grass, 

Or night dews on still waters between walls 
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass ; 

Music that gentlier on the spirit lies 
Than tired eye-lids upon tired eyes ; 

Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. 


337 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND PORT 

Here arc cool mosses deep, 

And through the moss the ivies creep, 

And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep. 

And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep. 

Why are we weigh d upon with heaviness, 

And utterly consumed with sharp distress. 

While all things else have rest from weariness ? 

All things have rest : why should we toil alone ? 

We only toil who are the 'first of things, 

And make perpetual moan, 

Still from one sorrow to another thrown : 

Nor ever fold our wings. 

And cease from wandeiings; 

Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm ; 

Nor hearken what the inner spirit sings, 

‘ There is no joy but calm !’ 

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?” 

She paused — 

“ My soul was an enchanted boat 
Which, like a sleeping swan, did float 
Upon the silver waves of her sweet singing.” 

Half unconscious, I looked up. Before rne hung a copy of 
Raflaelle’s cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. Ag 
my eye wandered over it, it seemed to blend into harmony 
with the feelings which the poem had stirred. I seemed to 
float upon the glassy lake. I watched the vista of the 
waters and mountains, receding into the dreamy infinite of 
the still summer sky. Softly from distant shores came the 
hum of eager multitudes; towers and palaces slept quietly 
beneath the eastern sun. In front, fantastic fishes, and the 
birds of the mountain and the lake, confessed His power, who 
sat there in His calm godlike beauty, His eye ranging ovei 
all that still infinity of His own works, over all that wondrous 
line of figures, which seemed to express every gradation of 
spiritual consciousness, from the dark self-condemned dislike 
of Judas’s averted and wily face, through mere animal greedi- 
ness to the first dawnings of surprise, and on to the manly awe 
and gratitude of Andrew’s majestic figure, and the self-abhor- 
rent humility of Peter, as he shrank down into the bottom of 
the skiff, and with convulsive palms and bursting brow, seem- 
ed to press out from his inmost heart the words, “Depart from 
me, for I am a sinful man, O Lor 1 !” Truly, pictures are 
the books of the unlearned, and of the mis-learned too. 
Glorious Pvafiaelle ! Shakspeare of the south ! Mighty preach- 
er, to whose blessed intuition it was given to know all human 


888 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


hearts, to embody in form and color all spiritual truths, com- 
mon alike to Protestant and Papist, to workman and to sage 
— Oh that I may meet thee before the throne of God, if it be 
but to thank thee for that one picture, in which thou didst 
reveal to me, in a single glance, every step of my own spirit- 
ual history ! 

She seemed to follow my eyes, and guess from them the 
workings of my heart. ; for now, in a low half-abstracted voice, 
as Diotima may have talked of old, she began to speak of rest 
and labor, of death and life ; of a labor which is perfect rest 
— of a daily death, which is but daily birth — of weakness, 
which is the strength of God ; and so she wandered on in her 
speech to Him who died for us. And gradually she turned 
to me. She laid one finger solemnly on n\y listless palm, as 
her words and voice became more intense, more personal. 
She talked of Him, as Mary may have talked just risen from 
His feet. She spoke of Him as I had never hearrt Him spoken 
of before — with a tender passionate loyalty, kept down and 
softened by the deepest awe. The sense of her intense belief, 
shining out in every lineament of her face, carried conviction 
to my heart more than ten thousand arguments could do. It 
must be true ! — Was not the power of it around her like a 
glory ? She spoke of Him as near us — watching us — in words 
of such vivid eloquence that I turned half-startled to her, as 
if I expected to see Him standing by her side. 

She spoke of Him as the great Reformer ; and yet as the 
true conservative ; the inspirer of all new truths, revealing in 
His Bible to every age abysses of new wisdom, as the times 
require ; and yet the vindicator of all which is ancient and 
eternal — the justifier of His own dealings with man from the 
beginning. She spoke of him as the true demagogue — the 
champion of the poor ; and yet as the true King, above and 
below all earthly rank ; on whose will alone all real superior- 
ity of man to man, all the time-justified and time-honored usages 
of the family, the society, the nation, stand and shall stand 
forever. 

And then she changed her tone ; and in a voice of infinite 
tenderness, she spoke of Him as the Creator, the Word, the 
Inspirer, the only perfect Artist, the Fountain of all Genius. 

She made me feel — would that his ministers had made me 
feel it before, since they say that they believe it — that Fie had 
passed victorious through my vilest temptations, that He sym- 
pathized with my every struggle. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


339 


She told me how He, in the first dawn of manhood, full of 
the dim consciousness of His own power, full of strange yearn- 
ing presentiments about His own sad and glorious destiny, went 
up into the wilderness, as every youth, above all every genius, 
must, there to be tempted of the devil. She told how alone 
with the wild beasts, and the brute powers of nature. He saw 
irito the open .secret — the mystery of man’s twofold life. His 
kingship over earth. His sonship under God : and conquered 
in the might of His knowledge. How He was tempted, like 
every genius, to use His creative powers for selfish ends — to 
yield to the lust of display and singularity and break through 
those laws which He came to reveal and to fulfill — to do one 
little act of evil, that He might secure thereby the harvest of 
good which was the object of His life : and how he had con- 
quered in the faith that He was the son of God. She told 
me how He had borne the sorrows of genius ; how' the slight- 
est pang that I had ever felt was but a dim faint pattern of 
His ; how He, above all men, had felt the agony of calumny, 
misconception, misinterpretation ; how He had fought with 
bigotry and stupidity, casting His pearls before swine, know- 
ing full well what it w'as to speak to the deaf and the blind ; 
how He had wept over Jerusalem, in the bitterness of disap- 
pointed patriotism, w-hen He had tried in vain to aw’akcn 
within a nation of slavish and yet rebellious bigots, the con- 
sciousness of their glorious calling 

It w^as too much — I hid my face in the coverlet, and burst 
out into a long low, and yet most happy weeping. She rose and 
w-ent to the window and beckoned Katie from the room wdthin. 

“I am afraid,” she said, “my conversation has been too 
much for him.” 

“ Show'ers sweeten the air,” said Katie ; and truly enough, 
as my owm lightened brain told me. 

Eleanor — for so I must call her now — stood watching me 
for a few minutes, and then glided back to the bed-side, and 
sat down again. 

“ You find the room quiet ?” 

“ Wonderfully quiet. The roar of the city outside is almost 
soothing, and the noise of every carriage seems to cease sud- 
denly, just as it becomes painfully near.” 

“ We have had straw laid down,” she answered, “ all along 
this part of the street.” 

This last drop of kindness filled the cup to overflowing : a 
vail fell from before my eyes — it was she who had been my 
friend, my guardian angel, from the beginning I 


840 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

“ You — you — idiot that I have been! I sec it all now It 
was you who laid that paper to catch my eye on that first 

evening at D ! — you paid my debt to my cousin ' — you 

visited Mackaye in his last illness !” 

She made a sign of assent. 

“ You saw from the beginning my danger, my weakness ! — 
you tried to turn me from my frantic and fruitless passion ! — 
you tried to save me from the very gulf into which I forced 
myself! — and I — I have hated you in return — cherished sus- 
picions too ridiculous to confess, only equaled by the absurdity 
of that other dream !” 

“Would that other dream have ever given you peace, even 
if it had ever become reality ?” 

She spoke gently, slowly, seriously ; waiting between each 
question for the answer which I dared not give. 

“ What was it that you adored ? a soul, or a face 1 The 
inward reality, or the outward symbol, which is only valuable 
as a sacrament of the loveliness within?” 

“Ay !” thought I, “ and was that loveliness within] What 
was that beauty but a hollow mask?” How barren, borrow- 
ed, trivial, every thought and word of hers seemed now as I 
looked back upon them, in comparison with the rich luxuri- 
ance, the startling originality, of thought and deed and sym- 
pathy, in her who now sat by mo, wan and faded, beautiful 
no more, as men call beauty, but with the spirit of an arch- 
angel gazing from those clear fiery eyes ! And as I looked at 
her, an emotion utterly new to me arose ; utter trust, delight, 
submission, gratitude, awe — if it was love, it was love as of a 
dog toward his master 

“ Ay,” I murmured, half unconscious that I spoke aloud, 
“ her I loved, and love no longer : but you, you, I worship 
and forever !” 

“Worship God!” she answered. “If it shall please you 
hereafter to call me friend, T shall refuse neither the name not 
its duties. But remember always, that whatsoever interest I 
feel in you, and, indeed, have felt from the first time I saw 
your poems, I can not give or accept friendship upon any 
ground so shallow and changeable as personal preference. The 
time was, when I thought it a mark of superior intellect and 
refinement to be as exclusive in my friendships as in my theo- 
ries. Now T have learned that that is most spiritual and noble 
which is also most universr.l. If we are to call each other 
friends, it must be for a reason which equally includes the 
outcast and the jirofligate, the felon and the slave.” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POE . 


341 


‘ VVliat do you mean ?” 1 asked, half disappointed. 

“ Only for the sake of Him who died for all alike,” 

Why did she rise and call Crossthwaite from the next room 
where he was writing? Was it from the womanly tact and 
delicacy which feared lest my excited feelings might lead me 
on to some too daring expression, and give me the pain of a 
rebuff, however gentle ; or was it that she wished him as 
well as me, to hear the memorable words which followed, to 
which she seemed to have been all along alluring me, and 
calling up in my mind, one by one, the very questions to 
which she had prepared the answers ? 

“ That name !” 1 answered. “ Alas ! has it not been in 
every age the watchward, not of an all-embracing charity, but 
of self-conceit and bigotry, excommunication and persecution ?” 

“ That is what men have made it ; not God, or he who 
bears it, the Son of God. Yes, men have separated from each 
other, slandered each other, murdered each other in that name ; 
and blasphemed it by that very act. But when did they 
unite in any name but that ? Look all history through — from 
the early churches, unconscious and infantile ideas of God’s 
kingdom, as Eden was of the human race, when love alone 
M^as law, and none said that aught that he possessed was his 
own — but they had all things in common — Whose name was 
the bond of unity for that brotherhood, such as the earth had 
never seen — when the Roman lady and the Negro slave par- 
took together at the table of the same bread and wine, and sat 
together at the feet of the Syrian tent-maker ? ‘ One is our 

Master, even Christ, who sits at the right hand of God, and in 
Him we are all brothers,’ Not self-ehoseii preference for His 
precepts, but the overwhelming faith in His presence. His rule, 
His love, bound those rich hearts together. Look onward, too, 
at the first followers of St. Bennet and St. Francis, at the 
Cameronians among their Scottish hills, or the little persecuted 
flock who in a dark and godless time gathered around John 
Wesley by pit-mouths and on Cornish cliffs — Look, too, at the 
great societies of our own days, which, however imperfectly, 
still lovingly and earnestly do their measure of God’s work at 
home and abroad ; and say, when was there ever real union 
co-operation, philanthropy, equality, brotherhood, among men, 
save in loyalty to Him — Jesus, who died upon the cross ?” 

And she bowed her head reverently before that unseen 
Majesty ; and then looked up at us again. Those eyes, now 
brimming full of earnest tears, would have melted stonier 
hearts than ours that day. 


312 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Do you not believe me ? Then I must quote against you 
one of your own prophets — a ruined angel — even as you might 
have been. ' 

When Camille Desmoulins, the revolutionary, about to 
ilie, as is the fate of such, by the hands of revolutionaries, w'as 
asked his age, he answered they say, that it was the same as 
that of the ‘ bon sans-culotte Jesus.’ I do not blame those 
who shrink from that speech as blasphemous. I, too, have 
spoken hasty words and hard, and prided myself on breaking 
the bruised reed, and quenching the smoking flax. Time was, 
when I should have been the loudest in denouncing poor Ca- 
mille : but I have long since seemed to see in those words the 
distortion of an almighty truth — a truth that shall shake 
thrones and principalities and powers, and fill the earth with 
its sound as with the trump of God : a prophecy like Ba- 
laam’s of old — ‘ I shall see Him, but not nigh ; I shall be- 
hold Him, but not near.’ Take all the heroes, 

prophets, poets, philosophers — w'here will you find the true 
demagogue — the speaker to man, simply as man — the friend 
of publicans and sinners, the stern foe of the Scribe and the 
Pharisee — with whom was no respect of persons — where is 
he? Socrates and Plato were noble; Zerdusht and Confut- 
zee, for aught we know, were nobler still ; but what were 
they but the exclusive rnystagogues of an enlightened few, 
like our own Emersons and Strausses, to compare great 
with small ? What gospel have they, or Strauss, or Emer- 
son, for the poor, the suffering, the oppressed? The Peo- 
ple’s Friend ? Where will you find him, but in Jesus of 
Nazareth?” 

“ We feel that; I assure you we feel that,” said Crossth 
waite. ‘‘ There are thousands of us who delight in His 
moral teaching, as the perfection of human excellence.” 

“ And what gospel is there in a moral teaching ? What 
good news is it to the savage of St. Giles’s, to the artisan 
crushed by the competition of others and his own evil habits, 
to tell him that he can be free — if he can make himself 
free ? That all men are his equals — if he can rise to theii 
level, or pull them down to his ? All men his brothers — if ho 
can only stop them from devouring him, or making it neces- 
sary for him to devour them ? Liberty, equality, and brother- 
hood ? Let the history of every nation, of every revolution 
— let your own sad experience, speak — have they been aught 
as yet but delusive phantoms — angels that turned to fiends 
the moment you seemed about to clasp them? Remember 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET, 


343 


the tenth of April, and the plots thereof, and answer your own 
hearts !” 

Crossthwaite buried his face in his hands. 

“ What !” I answered passionately, “ Will you rob us poor 
creatures of our only faith, our only hope on earth ? Let us 
be deceived, and deceived again ; yet we will believe ! AVe 
will hope on in spite of hope. We may die hut the idea lives 
forever. Liberty, equality, and fraternity must come. We 
know, we know that they must come ; and woe to those 
who seek to rob us of our faith 1” 

“ Keep, keep your faith,” she cried ; “ for it is not yours, 
but God’s who gave it ! But do not seek to realize that idea 
for yourselves.” 

“ Why, then, in the name of reason and mercy ?” 

“Because it is realized already for you. You are free; 
God has made you free. You are equals — you are brothers; 
for He is your king, who is no respecter of persons. He is 
your king, who has bought for you the rights of sons of God. 
He is your king, to wdiom all power is given in heaven and 
earth ; who reigns, and will reign, till He has put all enemies 
under His feet. That was Luther’s charter — with that alone 
he freed half Europe. That is your charter, and mine ; the 
everlasting ground of our rights, our mights, our duties, of ever- 
gathering storm for the oppressor, of ever-brightening sunshine 
for the oppressed. Own no other. Claim your investiture 
as free men from none but God. His will, His love, is a 
stronger ground, surely, than abstract rights and ethnological 
opinions. Abstract rights ? What ground, wdiat root have 
they, but the ever-changing opinions of men, born anew and 
dying anew with each fresh generation ? — while the word of 
God stands sure — ‘ You are mine, and I am yours, bound to 
you in an everlasting covenant.’ 

“ Abstract rights ? They are sure to end, in practice, only 
in the tyranny of their lather — opinion. In favored England 
here, the notions of abstract right among the many are not 
so incorrect, thanks to three centuries of Protestant civiliza- 
ion ; but only because the right notions suit the many at this 
moment. But in America, even now, the same ideas of ab- 
stract right do not interfere with the tyranny of the white 
man over the black. Why should they? The white man 
is handsomer, stronger, cunninger, worthier than the black. 
'L’hc black is more like an ape than the white man — he is — 
the fact is there ; and no notions of an abstract right will put 
that dow'n : nothing but another fact — a mightier, more uni- 


344 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


versal fact — Jesus of Nazareth died for the negro as well as ! 
for the white. Looked at apart from Him, each race, each ; 
individual of mankind, stands separate and alone, owing no - 
more brotherhood to each other than wolf to wolf, or pike to, ir 
pike — himself a mightier beast of prey — even as he has proved ^'j 
himself in every age. Looked at as he is, as joined into one i 
family in Christ, his archetype and head, even the most fran- 
tic declamations of the French democrat, about the majesty 
of the people, the divinity of mankind, become rational, rever 
ent, and literal. God’s grace outrivals all man’s boasting — 

‘ I have said, ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the 
most highest — ‘ children of God, members of Christ, of His 
body, of His flesh, and of His bones,’ — ‘ kings and priests to 
God,’ — free inheritors of the spirit of wisdom and understand- 
ing, the spirit of prudence and courage, of reverence and love, 
the spirit of Him who has said, ‘ Behold, the days come, when 
I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and no one shall 
teach his brother, saying. Know the Lord for all shall know 
Him, from the least even unto the greatest. Ay, even on 
the slaves and on the handmaidens in those days will I pour 
out of my spirit, saith the Lord !’ ” 

“ And that is really in the Bible ]” asked Crossthwaite. 

“ Ay” — she went on, her figure dilating, and her eyes flash- 
ing, like an inspired prophetess — “ that is in the Bible ! What 
would you more than that ? That is your charter ; the only 
ground of ail charters. You, like all mankind, have had dim 
inspirations, confused yearnings after your future destiny, and, 
like all the world from the beginning you have tried to realize, 
by self-willed methods of your own, what you can only do by 
God’s inspiration, by God’s method. Like the builders of Babel 
in old time, you have said, ‘ Go to, let us build us a city and 
a tower, whose top shall reach to heaven’ — And God has con 
founded you as he did them. By mistrust, division, passion, and 
folly, you are scattered abroad. Even in these last few days, 
the last dregs of your late plot have exploded miserably and 
ludicrously — your late companions are in prison, and the name 
of Chartist is a laughing-stock as well as an abomination.” 

“ Good Heavens ! Is this true ?” asked I, looking at 
Crossthwaite for confirmation. 

“ Too true, dear boy, too true : and if it had not been for 
these two angels here, I should have been in Newgate now !” 

“Yes,” she went on. “ The Charter seems dead, and lib' 
erty further ofi' than ever.” 

“ That seines true enough, indeed,” said I, bitterly. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


' 345 


“ Yes. But it is because Liberty is God’s beloved child, 
that He will not have her purity sullied by the touch of the 
profane. Because He loves the people, He will allow none 
but Himself to lead the people. Because He loves the people. 
He will teach the people by afflictions. And even now, while 
all this madness has been destroying itself. He has been hiding 
you in His secret place from the strife of tongues, that you 
may have to look tor a state founded on better things than 
acts of parliament, social contracts, and abstract rights — a 
city whose foundations are in the eternal promises, whose 
builder and maker is God.” 

She paused. — “ Go on, go on,” cried Crossthwaite and 1 
in the same breath. 

“ That state, that city, Jesus said, was come — was now 
within us, had we eyes to see. And it is come. Call it the 
church, the gospel, civilization, freedom, democracy, associa- 
tion, what you will — I shall call it by the name by which 
my Master spoke of it — the name which includes all these, 
and more than these — the kingdom of God. ‘ Without ob- 
servation,’ as he promised, secretly, but mightily, it has been 
growing, spreading, since that first Whitsuntide ; civilizing, 
humanizing, uniting this distracted earth. Men have fancied 
they found it in this system or in that, and in them only. They 
have cursed it in its own name, when they found it too wide 
for their own narrow notions. They have cried, ‘ Lo here !’ 
and ‘ Lo there !’ ‘ To this communion !’ or ‘ To that set of 

opinions !’ But it has gone its way — the way of Him wfflo 
made all things, and redeemed all things to Himself. In every 
age it has been a gospel to the poor. In every age it has, 
sooner or later, claimed the steps of civilization, the discoveries 
of science, as God’s inspirations, not man’s inventions. In 
every age, it has taught men to do that by God which they 
had failed in doing without Him. It is now ready, if we may 
judge by the signs of the times, once again to penetrate, to 
convert, to re-organize, the political and social life of England, 
perhaps of the world ; to vindicate democracy as the will 
and gift of God. Take it for the ground of your rights. If, 
henceforth, you claim political enfranchisement, claim it not 
as mere men, who may be villains, savages, animals, slaves of 
their own prejudices and passions ; but as members of Christ, 
children of God, inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, and 
therefore bound to realize it on earth. All other rights are 
mere mights — mere selfish demands to become tyrants in youi 
turn. If you wish to justify your Charter, do it on that ground 


346 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


Claim your share in national life, only because the nation is a 
spiritual body, whose king is the Son of God ; whose work, 
whose national character and powers, are allotted to it by the 
Spirit of Christ. Claim universal suffrage, only on the ground 
of the universal redemption of mankind — the universal priest- 1| 
hood of Christians. That argument will conquer, when all I 
have failed ; for God will make it conquer. Claim the disen- 1| 
franchisement of every man, rich or poor, who breaks the laws 
of God and man, not merely because he is an obstacle to you, 
but because he is a traitor to your common King in heaven, 
and to the spiritual kingdom of which he is a citizen. De- 
nounce the effete idol of property qualification, not because it 
happens to strengthen class interests against you, but because, 
as your mystic dream reminded you, and, therefore, as you 
knew long ago, there is no real rank, no real power, but worth ; 
and worth consists not in property, but in the grace of God. 
Claim, if you will, annual parliaments, as a means of enforcing 
the responsibility of rulers to the Christian community, of 
which they are to be, not the lords, but the ministers — the 
servants of all. But claim these, and all else for which you 
long, not from man, but from God, the King of men. And 
therefore, before you attempt to obtain them, make yourselves 
worthy of them — perhaps by that process you wall find some 
of them have become less needful. At all events, do not ask, 
do not hope, that He will give them to you, before you are 
able to profit by them. Believe that he has kept them from 
you hitherto, because they w^ould have been curses, and not 
blessings. Oh ! look back, look back at the history of English 
Radicalism for the last half century, and judge by your own 
deeds, your own words ; were you fit for those privileges which 
you so frantically demanded ? Do not answer me, that those 
who had them were equally unfit ; but thank God, if the case 
be indeed so, that your incapacity w'as not added to theirs, to 
make confusion worse confounded ! Learn a new lesson. 
Believe at last that you are in Christ, and become new creat- 
ures. With those miserable, aw^ful, farce-tragedies of April 
and June, let old things pass aw'ay, and all things become new. 
Believe that your kingdom is not of this w'orld, but of One 
whose servants must not fight. He that believeth, as the 
prophet says, wall not make haste. Beloved suffering broth- 
ers ! — are not your times in the hand of One who loved you 
to the death, who conquered, as you must do, not by WTath, 
but by martyrdom ? Try no more to meet Mammon with 
his own w^eapons, but commit your cause to Him who judges 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


847 


righteously, who is even now coming out of his plo/'-e to judge 
the earth, and to help the fatherless and poor unto their right, 
that the man of the world may be no more exalted against 
them — the poor man of Nazareth, crucified for you !” 

She ceased, and there was silence for a few moments, as 
if angels were waiting, hushed, to carry our repentance to the 
throne of Him we had forgotten. 

Crossthwaite had kept his face fast buried in his hands ; 
now he looked up with brimming eyes — 

“I see it — I see it all now. Oh, my God! my God! What 
infidels we have been !” 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 


MIRACLES AND SCIENCE. 

Sunrise, they say, often at first draws up and deepens the 
very mists which it is about to scatter: and even so, as the 
excitement of my first conviction cooled, dark doubts arose to 
dim the new-born light of hope and trust within me. The 
question of miracles had been ever since I had read Strauss 
my greatest stumblingblock — perhaps not unwillingly, for my 
doubts pampered my sense of intellectual acuteness and scien- 
tific knowledge ; and “ a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” 
But now that they interfered with nobler, more important, 
more immediately practical ideas, I longed to have them re- 
moved — I longed even to swallow them down on trust — to 
take the miracles “ into the bargain” as it were, for the sake 
of that mighty gospel of deliverance for the people, which 
accompanied them. Mean subterfuge ! which would not, could 
not, satisfy me. The thing was too precious, too all-important, 
to take one tittle of it on trust. I could not bear the con- 
sciousness of one hollow spot — the nether fires of doubt glar- 
ing through, even at one little crevice. I took my doubts to 
Lady Ellerton — Eleanor, as I must now call her, for she never 
allowed herself to be addressed by her title — and she referred 
me to her uncle : 

I could say somewhat on that point myself. But since 
your doubts are scientifie ones,- 1 had rather that you should 
discuss them with one whose knowledge of such subjects you, 
and all England with you, must revere.” 

“ Ah, but — pardon me ; he is a clergyman.” 

“ And therefore bound to prove, whether he believes in his ‘ 
own proof or not. Unworthy suspicion !” she cried, with a 
touch of her old manner. “ If you had known that man’s 
literary history for the last thirty years, you would not suspect 
him, at least, of sacrificing truth and conscience to interest, 
or to fear of the world’s insults.” 

I was rebuked ; and, not without hope and confidence, I 
broached the question to the good dean when he came in — as 
he happened to do that very day. 

“ I hardly like to state my difficulties,” I began — “ for 1 
am afraid that I must h irt myself in your eyes by offending 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


849 


your— prejudices, if you will pardon so plain-spoken an ex- 
pression.” 

“ If,” he replied, in his bland courtly way, “ I arn so un- 
fortunate as to have any prejudices left, you can not do rne a 
greater kindness than by offending them — or by any othei 
means, however severe — to make me conscious of the localitj 
of such a secret canker.” 

“But I am afraid that your own teaching has created, or 
at least corroborated, these doubts of mine.” < 

“ How so ?” 

“ You first taught me to revere science. You first taught 
me to admire and trust the immutable order, the perfect har- 
mony of the laws of Nature.” 

“ Ah ! I comprehend now !” he -answered, in a somewhat 
mournful tone — “ How much we have to answer for ! How 
often, in our carelessness, we offend those little ones, whose 
souls are precious in the sight of God I I have thought long 
and earnestly on the very subject which now distresses you ; 
perhaps every doubt which has passed through your mind, 
has exercised my own ; and, strange to say, you first set me 
on that new path of thought. A conversation which passed 

between us years ago at I) on the antithesis of natural 

and revealed religion — perhaps you recollect it ?” 

Yes, I recollected it better than he fancied, and recollected 
too — 1 thrust the thought behind me — it was even yet in- 
tolerable. 

“ That conversation first awoke in me the sense of an hith- 
erto unconscious inconsistency — a desire to reconcile two lines 
of thought — which I had hitherto considered as parallel, and 
impossible to unite. To you, and to my beloved niece here, I 
owe gratitude for that evening’s talk ; and you are freely wel- 
come to all my conclusions, for you have been, indirectly, the 
originator of them all.” 

“ Then, I must confess, that miracles seem to me impossible, 
iust because they break the laws of Nature. Pardon me — but 
there seems something blasphemous in supposing that God 
cai\ mar His own order ; His power I do not call in question, 
but the very thought of His so doing is abhorrent to me.” 

“It is as abhorrent to me as it can he to you, to Goethe, 
or to Strauss ; and yet I believe firmly in our Lord’s miracles ’ 

“ How so, if they break the laws of Nature?” 

“ Who told you, my dear young friend, that to break the 
customs of Nature, is to break her laws ? A phenomenon, -an 
appearance, whether it be a miracle or a comet, need not con- 


350 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 

tradict tnem because it is rare, because it is as yet not referable 
to them. Nature’s deepest laws, her only true laws, are her 
invisible ones. All analyses (I think you know enough to un- 
derstand my terms) whether of appearances, of causes, or of 
elements, only lead us down to fresh appearances — we can not 
see a law, let the power of our lens be ever so immense. The 
true causes remain just as impalpable, as unfathomable as 
ever, eluding equally our microscope and our induction — ever 
tending toward some great primal law, as Mr. Grove has 
well shown lately in his most valuable pamphlet — some great 
primal law, I say, manifesting itself, according to circum- 
stances, in countless diverse and unexpected forms — till all 
that the philosopher as well as the divine can say, is — The 
Spirit of Life, impalpable, transcendental, direct from God, is 
the only real cause. It ‘bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, 
or whither it goeth.’ What, if miracles should be the orderly 
results of some such deep, most orderly, and yet most spirit- 
ual law ?” 

“ I feel the force of your argument, but — ” 

“ But you will confess?, at least, that you, after the fashion 
of the crowd, have begun your argument by begging the very 
question in dispute, and may have, after all, created the very 
difficulty which torments you.” 

“ I confess it ; but I can not see how the miracles of Jesus 
— of our Lord — have any thing of order in them.” 

“ Tell me, then — to try the Socratic method — is disease, 
or health, the order and law of Nature ?” 

“ Health, surely ; we all confess that by calling diseases 
disorders.” 

“ Then, would one wdio healed diseases be a restorer, or a. 
breaker of order ?” 

“ A restorer, doubtless ; but — ” 

“ Like a patient scholar, and a scholarly patient, allow me 
to ‘ exhibit’ my own medicines according to my own notion 
of the various crises of your distemper. I assure you I will 
not play you false, or entrap you by quips and special plead- 
ing. You are aware that our Lord’s miracles were almost 
exclusively miracles of healing — restorations of that order of 
health which disease was breaking — that when the Scribes 
and Pharisees, superstitious and sense-boniid, asked Him for a 
sign from heaven, a contra-natural prodigy, he refused them 
as peremptorily as he did the fiend’s ‘ Command these stones 
that they be made bread.’ You will quote against me tha 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


351 


\\’at3r turned into wine, as an exception to this ruk. St. 
August ne answered that objection centuries ago, by the same 
argument as I am now using. Allow Jesus to have been the 
Lord of Creation, and what was he doing then, but Mdiat he 
does in the maturing of every grape — transformed from ai. . 
and water even as that wine in Cana ? Goethe himself, un 
wittingly, has made Mephistopheles even see as much as that, 

Wine is sap, and grapes are wood, 

The wooden board yields wine as g iod.*’ 

“ But the time? so infinitely shorter than that which Na- 
ture usually occupies in the process !” 

“ Time and space are no Gods, as a wise German says ; 
and as the electric telegraph ought already to have taught 
you. They are customs, but who has proved them to bo 
laws of Nature ? No ; analyze these miracles one by one, 
fairly, carefully, scientifically, and you will find that if you 
want prodigies, really blasphemous and absurd, infractions of 
the laws of Nature, amputated limbs growing again, and 
dead men walking away with their heads under their arms, 
you must go to the Popish legends, but not to the miracles of 
the Gospels. And now for your ‘ but’ — ” 

“ The raising of the dead to life ? Surely death is the ap- 
pointed end of every animal — ay, of every species, and of man 
among the rest.” 

“ Who denies it ? But is premature death? the death of 
Jarius’s daughter, of the widow’s son at Nain, the death of 
Jesus himself, in the prime of youth and vigor — or rather that 
gradual decay of ripe old age, through which I now, thank 
God, so fast am traveling ? What nobler restoration of order, 
what clearer vindication of the laws of Nature from the dis- 
order of diseases, than to recall the dead to their natural and 
normal period of life ?” 

I was silent a few moments, having nothing to answer ; 
then. 

“ After all, these may have been restorations of the law of 
Nature. But why was the law broken in order to restore it? 
The Tenth of April has taught me, at least, that disonlcr 
can not cast disorder out.” 

“ Again I ask, why do you assume the very point in ques- 
tion ? Again I ask, who knows what really are the laws of 
Nature ? You have heard Bacon’s golden rule — ‘ Nature is 
conquered by obeying her ?’ ” 

I have.” 


•352 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Then who more likely, who more certain, to fulfill that 
law to hitherto unattained perfection, than He who came to 
obey, not outward nature merely, but, as Bacon meant, the 
inner ideas, the spirit of Nature, which is the will of God ? 
He who came to do utterly, not His own will, but the will of 
the Father who sent him ] Who is so presumptuous as to 
limit the future triumphs of science ? Surely no one who 
has watched her giant strides during the last century. Shall 
Stephenson and Faraday, and the inventors of the calculating 
machine, and the electric telegraph, have fulfilled such won- 
ders by their weak and partial obedience to the ‘ Will of God 
expressed in things’ — and he who obeyed, even unto the death, 
have possessed no higher power than theirs?” 

“ Indeed,” I said, “ your words stagger me. But there is 
another old objection which they have reawakened in my 
mind. You will say I am shifting my ground sadly. But 
you must pardon me.” 

“ Let us hear. They need not be irrelevant. The un- 
conscious logic of association is often deeper and truer than 
any syllogism.” 

“ These modern discoveries in medicine seem to show that 
Christ’s miracles may be attributed to natural causes.” 

“ And thereby justify them. For what else have I been 
arguing. The difficulty lies only in the rationalist’s shallow 
and sensuous view of Nature, and in his ambiguous slip-slop 
trick of using the word natural to mean, in one sentence, 

‘ material,’ and in the next, as I use it, only ‘ normal and 
orderly.’ Every new wonder in medicine which this great 
age discovers — what does it prove, but that Christ need have 
broken no natural laws to do that of old, which can be done 
now without breaking them — if you will but believe that 
these gifts of healing are all inspired and revealed by Him 
who is the Great Physician, the Life, the Lord of that vital 
energy by whom all cures are wrought. 

“ The surgeons of St. George’s make the boy walk who 
has been lame from his mother’s womb. But have they 
given life to a single bone or muscle of his limbs ? They 
have only put them into that position — those circumstances, 
in which the God-given life in them can have its free and 
normal play, and produce the cure which they only assist. I 
claim that miracle of science, as I do all future ones, as the 
inspiration of Him who made the lame to walk in J udea, not 
by producing new organs, but by His creative will — quicken- 
ing and liberating those which already existed. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


353 


“ The mesmerist, again, says that he can cure a spirit of 
infirmity, an hysteric or paralytic patient, by shedding forth 
on them his own vital energy ; and, therefore he will have it, 
that Christ’s miracles W'ere but mesmeric feats. I grant, foi 
the sake of argument, that he possesses the power which he 
claims ; though I may think his facts too new, too undigested, 
often too exaggerated, to claim my certain assent. But, I 
say, I take you on your own ground; and, indeed, if man be 
the image of God, his vital energy may, for aught I know, be 
able, like God’s, to communicate some spark of life. But then, 
what must have been the vital energy of Him who was the 
life itself; who was filled without measure with the spirit, 
not only of humanity, but with that of God the Lord and 
Giver of life ? Do but let the Bible tell its own story; grant, 
for the sake of argument, the truth of the dogmas which it 
asserts throughout, and it becomes a consistent whole. When 
a man begins, as Strauss does, by assuming the falsity of its 
conclusions, no wonder if he finds its premises a fragmentary 
chaos of contradictions.” 

“ And what else,” asked Eleanor, passionately, “ what else 
is the meaning of that highest human honor, the Sacrament 
of the Lord’s Supper, ‘but a perennial token that the same 
life-giving spirit is the free right of all 

And thereon followed happy, peaceful, hopeful words, which 
the reader, if he call himself a Christian, ought to be able to 
imagine for himself I am afraid that, writing from memoiy, 
I should do as little justice to them as I have to the dean’s 
arguments in this chapter. Of the consequences which they 
produced in rae, I will speak anon. 



CHAPTER XX XIX. 


NEMPjS^S 


It was a month or more before I summoned courage to ash 
after my cousin. 

Eleanor looked solemnly at me. : 

“ Did you not know it? He is dead.” 

“ Dead !” I was almost stunned by the announcement. 

“ Of typhus fever. He died three weeks ago ; and not only 
he, but the servant wdio brushed his clothes, and the shopman, 
who had, a few days before, brought him a n-^ vv coat home.” 

“ How did you learn all this ?” 

“From Mr Crossthwaite. But the strangest part of the \ 
sad story is to come. Crossthwaite’s suspicions were aroused 
by some incidental circumstance, and knowing of Downes's 
death, and the fact that you most probably caught your fever 
in that miserable being’s house, he made such inquiries as 
satisfied him that it was no other than your cousin’s coat-^ — ” 

“ Which covered the corpses in that fearful chamber ?” 

“ It was indeed.” 

^ “Just, awful God ! And this was the consistent Nerne.sis 
of all poor George’s thrift and cunning, of his determination 
to carry the buy-cheap-and-sell-dear commercialism, in which 
he had been brought up^ into every act of life I Did I rejoice ? 
No; all revenge, all spite had been scourged out of me. I | 
mourned for him as for a brother, till the thought flashed 
across me — Lillian was free ! Half unconscious, I stammer- 
cd her name inquiringly.” ' 

“ Judge for yourself,” answered Eleanor, mildly, yet with a 
deep, severe meaning in her tone. 

1 was silent. 


The tempest in my heart was ready to burst forth again ; 
but she, my guardian-angel, soothed it for me. 

“ She is much changed ; sorrow and sickness — for she, too, 
has had the fever — and, alas I less resignation or peace within, 
than those w’ho love her would have wished to see, have worn 
ber down. Little remains now of that loveliness.” 

“ Which I idolized in my folly I” 

“ Thank God, thank God ! that you see that at last : I 
knew it all along. I knew that there was nothing there for 


ALTON LOCKR, TAILOR AND POET. 


355 


your heart to rest upon — nothing to satisfy your inteliect— 
and, therefore, I tried to turn you from your dream. 1 did 
it harshly, angrily, too sharply, yet not explicitly enough. I 
ought to have made allowances for you. I should have known 
liow enchanting, intoxicating, mere outward perfection must 
have been to one of your perceptions, shut out so long as you 
had been from the beautiful in art and nature. But I was 
cruel. Alas ! I had not then learned to sympathize ; and I 
have often since felt with terror, that I, too, may have many 
of your sins to answer for ; that I, even I, helped to drive you 
on to bitterness and despair.” 

“ Oh, do not say so ! You have don.e to me, meant to me, 
nothing but good.” 

“ Be not too* sure of that. You little know me. You little 
know the pride which I have fostered — even the mean anger 
against you, for being the protegee of any one but myself. 
That exclusiveness, and shyness, and proud reserve, is the 
bane of our English character — it has been tlie bane of mine — 
daily I strive to root it out. Come — I will do so now. You 
wonder why I am here. Y'ou shall hear somewhat of my 
story ; and do not fancy that I am showing you a peculiar mark 
of honor or confidence. If the history of my life can be of 
use to tlic meanest, they arc welcome to the secrets of my 
inmost heart.” 

“I was my parents’ only child, an heiress, highly born, and 
highly educated. Every circumstance of humanity which 
could pamper pride was mine, and I battened on the poison 
I painted, 1 sang, I wrote in prOse and verse — they told mo, 
not "without success. Men said that I was beautiful — 1 knew 
that myself, and reveled and gloried in the thought. Accus- 
tomed to see myself the centre of all my parents’ hopes and 
fears, to be surrounded by flatterers, to indulge in secret the 
still more fatal triumph of contempt for those I thought less 
gifted than myself, self became the centre of my thoughts. 
Pleasure was all I thought of. But not what the vulgar call 
pleasure. That I disdained, ‘while like you, I worshiped all 
that w'as pleasurable to the intellect and the taste. The 
beautiful was my God. I lived, in deliberate intoxication, on 
poetry, music, painting, and every antitype of them which 1 
could find in the world around. At last I met with — one 
whom you once saw. He first awoke in me the sense of the 
vast duties and responsibilities of my station — his example first 
taught me to care for the many rather than for the few. 1 1 
was a blessed lesson : yet even that 1 turned to poison, by 


V 


35(3 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

making self, still self, the object of my very benevolence. To ^ 
be a philanthropist, a philosopher, a feudal queen, amid the 
blessings and the praise of dependent hundreds — that was my 
new ideal ; for that I turned the whole force of my intellect 
to the study of history, of social and economic questions. F rom 
Bentham and Malthus to Fourrier and Proudhon,! read them 
all. I made them all fit into that idol-temple of self which 
I was rearing, and fancied that I did my duty, by becoming 
one of the great ones of the earth. My ideal was not the 
crucified Nazarcne, but some Hairoun Alraschid, in luxurious 
splendor, pampering his pride by bestowing as a favor those 
mercies which God commands as the right of all. I thought n 
to serve God, forsooth, by serving Mammon and myself. Fool 
that I was ! I could not see God’s handwriting on the wall 
against me. ‘ How hardly shall they that have riches enter 

into the kingdom of heaven I’ 

“ You gave me, unintentionally, a warning hint. The 
capabilities which I saw in you made me suspect that those 
below might be more nearly my equals than I had yet fancied. 
Your vivid descriptions of the misery among whole classes of 
workmen — misery caused and ever increased by the very 
system of society itself — gave a momentary shock to my fairy 
palace. They drove me back upon the simple old question, 
which has been asked by every honest heart, age after age, 

‘ What right have I to revel in luxury, while thousands arc 
starving ? Why do I pride myself on doling out to them 
srnall fractions of that wealth, which, if sacrificed utterly and 
at once, might help to raise hundreds to a civilization as high 
as my own.’ I could not face the thought ; and angry with 
you lor having awakened it, however unintentionally, I shrank 
back behind the pitiable worn-out fallacy, that luxury was 
necessary to give employment. I knew that it Avas a fallacy ; 

I knew that the labor spent in producing unnecessary things 
for one rich man, may just as well have gone in producing 
necessaries for a hundred poor, or employ the architect and 
the painter for public bodies as well as private individuals. 
That even for the production of luxuries, the monopolizing 
demand of the rich was not required — that the appliances ol 
real civilization, the landscapes, gardens, stately rooms, baths, 
books, pictures, works of art, collections of curiosities, which 
now went to pamper me alone — me, one single human soul 
— might be helping, in an associate society, to civilize a hun- 
dred families, now debarred from them by isolated poverty, 
without robbing me of an atoii of the real enjoyment oi 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


357 


benefit of them. I knew it, I say, to be a fallacy, and yet I 
hid behind it from the eye of God. Besides, ‘it always had 
been so — the few rich, and the many poor. I was but one 
more among millions.'’ ” 

She paused a moment, as if to gather strength, and then 
continued : 

“ The blow came. My idol — for he, too, was an idol — Ta 
please him I had begun — to please myself in pleasing him, 1 
was trying to become great — and with him went from me 
that sphere of labor which was to witness the triumph of 
my pride. I saw the estate pass into other hands ; a mighty 
change passed over me, as impossible, perhaps, as unfitting, 
for me to analyze. I was considered mad. Perhaps I was 
so ; there is a Divine insanity, a celestial folly, which conquers 
worlds. At least, when that period was past, I had done 
and suflered so strangely, that nothing henceforth could seem 
strange to mo. I had broken the yoke of custom and opinion. 
My only ground was now the bare realities of human life and 
duty. In poverty and loneliness I thought out the problems 
of society, and seemed to myself to have found the one solu- 
tion — self-sacrifice. Following my first impulse, I had given 
largely to every charitable institution I could hear of — God 
forbid that I should regret those gifts — yet the money, I soon 
found, might have been better spent. One by one, every 
institution disappointed me ; they seemed, after all, only 
means for keeping the poor in their degradation, by making it 
just not intolerable to them — means for enabling Mammon to 
draw fresh victims into his den, by taking off his hands those 
whom he had already worn out into uselessness. Then I 
tried association among my own sex — among the most miser- 
able and degraded of them. I simply tried to put them into 
a position in which they might work for each other, and not 
for a single tyrant ; in which that tyrant’s profits might be 
divided among the slaves themselves. Experienced men 
warned me that I should fail ; that such a plan would be 
destroyed by the innate selfishness and rivalry of human 
nature ; that it demanded what was impossible to find, good 
faith, fraternal love, overruling moral influence. I answered, 
that I knew that already ; that nothing but Christianity 
alone could supply that want, but that it could and should 
supply it ; that I would teach them to live as sisters, by 
living with them as their sister myself. To become the 
teacher, the minister, the slave of those whom I was trying 
to rescue, was now my one idea ; to lead them on, not by 


S58 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND TOET. 


machinery, but by precept, by example, by the influence of 
every gift and talent which God had bestowed upon me ; tc ^ 
devote to them my enthusiasm, my eloquence, my poetry, my | 
art, my science ; to tell them who had bestowed their gifts 
on me, and would bestow, to each according to her measure, 
the same on them ; to make my work-rooms in one word, not 
a machinery, but a family. And I have succeeded — as others 
will succeed, long after my name, my small endeavors, arc 
forgotten amid the great new world — new Church I should jj 
have said — of enfranchised and fraternal labor.” ' 

And this was the suspected aristocrat ! Oh, my brothers, j; 
my brothers I little you know how many a noble soul, among 
those ranks which you consider only as your foes, is yearning 
to love, to help, to live and die for you, did they but know the 
way ! Is it their fault, if God has placed them where they 
are ? Is it their fault, if they reluse to part with their 
wealth, before they are sure that such a sacrifice would really j 

be a mercy to you ? Show yourselves worthy of association. | 

Show that you can do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly ' 

with your God, as brothers before one Father, subjects of one ^ 

crucified King — and see then whether the spirit of self-sacri- > 

fice is dead among the rich ! See whether there are not left ’ 

in England yet seven thousand who have not bowed the knee ! 

to Mammon, who will not fear to “give their substance to the 
fiee,” if they find that the Son has made you free — free from 
your own sins, as well as from the sins of others ! | 


CHAPTEPv XL. 


PRIESTS AND PEOPLE. 

“But after all,” I said one day, “the great practical obje'- 
tion still remains unanswered — the clergy 'i Are we to throw 
ourselves into their hands, after all ? Are we, who have been 
declaiming all our lives against priestcraft, voluntarily to forge 
again the chains of our slavery to a class w'horn M'e neither 
trust nor honor ?” 

She smiled. “ If you wnll examine the Prayer-Book, you 
will not find, as far as I am aware, any thing which binds a 
man to become the slave of the priesthood, ^voluntarily or 
otherwise. Whether the people become priest-ridden or not, 
hereafter will depend, as it always has done, utterly on them- 
selves. As long as the people act upon their spiritual liberty 
and live with eyes undimmed by superstitious fear, fixed in 
loving boldness on their Father in heaven, and their King, 
the first-born among many brethren, the priesthood will re- 
main, as God intended them, only the interpreters and wit- 
nesses of His will and His kingdom. But let them turn their 
eyes from Him to aught in earth or heaven beside, and there 
will be no lack of priestcraft, of vails to hide Him from them, 
tyrants to keep them from Him, idols to ape His likeness. 
A sinful people will be sure to be a priest-ridden people ; in 
reality, though not in name; by journalists and demagogues, 
if not by class-leaders and popes : and of the two, I confess I 
should prefer a Hildebrand to an O’Flynn.” 

“ But,” I replied, “ we do not love, we do not trust, w'c do 
not respect the clergy. Has their conduct to the masses, for 
the last century, deserved that w^e should do so ? Will you 
ask us to obey the men whom we despise 1” 

“ God forbid !” she answered. “ But you must surely be 
aware of the miraculous, ever-increasing improvement in the 
clergy.” 

“In morals,” I said, “and in industry, doubtless; but not 
upon those points which are to us just now dearer than their 
morals or their industry, because they involve the very exist- 
ence of our own industry and our own morals — I mean, social 
and political subjects. On them the clergy seem to me as 
ignorant, as bigoted, as aristocratic as ever.” 


360 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ But, suppose that there were a rapidly-increasing ciass 
among the clergy, who were willing to help you to the utter- 
most — and you must feel that their help would he worth hav- 
ing — toward the attainment of social reform, if you would 
waive for a time merely political reform ?” 

“What!” I said, “give up the very ideas for which we 
have struggled, and sinned, and all but died ? and will struggle, 
and, if need be, die for still, or confess ourselves traitors to the 
common weal ?” 

“ The Charter, like its supporters, must die to itself before 
it lives to God. Is it not even now further ofl'than ever I” 

“ It seems so indeed — but what do you mean ?” 

“ You regarded the Charter as an absolute end. You made 
a selfish and a self-willed idol of it. And therefore God s 
blessing did not rest on it or you.” 

“ We want it as a means as well as an end — as a means 
for the highest and widest social reform, as well as a right 
dependent on eternal justice.” 

“ Let the working classes prove that, then,” she replied, 
“in their actions now. If it be true, as I would fain believe 
it to be, let them show that they are willing to give up their 
will to God’s will ; to compass those social reforms by the 
means which God puts in their way, and wait for His own 
good time to give them, or not to give them, those means 
which they in their own minds prefer. This is what I meant 
by saying that Chartism must die to itself before it has a 
chance of living to God. You must feel, too, that Chartism 
has sinned — has defiled itself in the eyes of the wise, the good, 
the gentle. Your only way now to soften the prejudice against 
it, is to show that you can live like men, and brothers, and 
Christians without it. You can not wonder if the clergy shall 
object awhile to help you toward that Charter, which the 
majority of you demanded for the express purpose of destroying 
the creed which the clergy do believe, however badly they 
may have acted upon it.” 

“ It is all true enough — bitterly true. But yet, why do we 
need the help of the clergy ?” 

“ Because you need the help of the whole nation ; because 
there are other classes to be considered besides yourselves ; be- 
cause the nation is neither the few nor the many, but the all ; 
because it is only by the co-operation of all the members of a 
body, that any one member can fulfill its calling in health 
and freedom ; because", as long as you stand aloof from the 
clergy, or from any other class, through pride, self-interest, oi 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


161 


willful ignorance, you are keeping up those very class distinc- 
tions of which you and 1 too complain, as ‘ hateful equally to 
God and to his enemies and, finally, because the clergy are 
the class which God has appointed to unite all others ; which, 
in as far as it fulfills its calling, and is indeed a priesthood, is 
above and below all rank, and knows no man after the flesh, 
but only on the ground of his spiritual worth, and his birth- 
right in that kingdom which is the heritage of all.” 

“ Truly,” I answered, “ the idea is a noble one — but look 
at the reality ! Has not priestly pandering to tyrants made 
the Church, in every age, a scoff and a by-word among free 
men ?” 

“ May it ever do so,” she replied, “ whenever such a sin 
exists ! But yet, look at the other side of the picture. Did 
not th:- priesthood, in the first ages, glory not in the name, 
but, what is better, in the office, of democrats 1 Did not the 
Roman tyrants hunt them down as wild beasts, because they 
were democrats, proclaiming to the slave and to the barbarian 
a spiritual freedom and a heavenly citizenship, before which 
the Roman w’ell knew his power must vanish into naught 'i 
Who, during the invasion of the barbarians, protected the 
poor against their conquerors ? Who, in the middle age, 
stood between the baron and his serfs ? Who, in their mon- 
asteries, realized spiritual democracy — the nothingness of rank 
and wealth, the practical might of co-operation and self-sacri- 
fice 'i Who delivered England from the Pope ? Who spread 
throughout every cottage in the land the Bible and Protest- 
antism, the book and the religion which declares that a man’s 
soul is free in the sight of God ? Who, at the martyr’s stake 
in Oxford, ‘lighted the candle in England that shall never be 
put out ?’ Who, by suffering, and not by rebellion, drove 
the last perjured Stuart from his throne, and united every 
sect and class in one of the noblest steps in England’s progress? 
You will say these are the exceptions ; I say nay ; they are 
rather a few great and striking manifestations of an influence 
which has been, unseen though not unfelt, at work for ages, 
converting, consecrating, organizing every fresh invention of 
mankind, and which is now on the e\e of christianizing de- 
mocracy, as it did Mediaeval Feudalism, Tudor Nationalism, 
Whig Constitutionalism ; and which wili succeed in Chris- 
tianizing it, and so alone making it rational, human, possible; 
because the priesthood alone, of all human institutions, te-stifies 
of Christ the King of men, the Lord of all things, the inspirer 
of all discoveries; who reigns, and will reign, till He has }>ut 

Q 


362 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 

all things under his feet, and the kingdoms of the world have 
become the kingdoms of God and of his Christ. Be sure, as 
it always has been, so will it be now. Without the priest- 
hood there is no freedom for the people. Statesmen know it ; 
and, therefore, those who would keep the people fettered, find 
it necessary to keep the priesthood fettered also. The people 
never can be themselves without co-operation with the priest- 
hood ; and the priesthood never can be themselves without 
co-operation with the people. They may help to make a 
sect-church for the rich, as they have been doing, or a sect- 
church for paupers (which is also the most subtle form of a 
sect-church for the rich), as a party in England are trying 
now to do — as I once gladly would have done myself : but if 
they would be truly priests of God, and priests of the Uni- 
versal Church, they must be priests of the people, priests of 
the masses, priests after the likeness of Him who died on the 
cross.” 

“And are there any men,” I said, “who believe this? and, 
what is more, have courage to act upon it, now in the very 
hour of Mammon’s triumph ?” 

“There are those who are willing, who are determined, 
whatever it may cost them, to fraternize with those whom 
they take shame to themselves for having neglected ; to preach 
and to organize, in concert with them, a Holy War against 
the social abuses which are England’s shame ; and, first and 
foremost, against the fiend of competition. They do not want 
to be dictators to the working-men. They know that they 
have a message to the artisan, but they know, too, that the 
artisan has a message to them ; and they are not afraid to 
hear it. They do not wish to make him a puppet for any sys- 
tem of their own ; they only are willing, if he will take the 
liand they offer him, to devote themselves, body and soul, to 
the great end of enabling the artisan to govern himself; to 
produce in the capacity of a free man, and not of a slave ; to 
eat the food he earns, and wear the clothes he makes. Will 
your working brothers co-operate with these men ? Are they, 
do you think, such bigots as to let political differences stand 
between them and those who fain would treat them as their 
brothers ; or will they fight manfully side by side with them 
in the battle against Mammon, trusting to God, that if in any 
thing they are otherwise minded. He will, in His own good 
time, reveal even that unto them? Do you think, to take 
one instance, the men of your own trade w'ould heartily join 
a handful of these men in an experiment of associate labor. 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 303 

even though there should ho a clergyman or two among 
them?”' 

“Join them?” I said. “Can you ask the question? I. 
I’or one, would devote myself, body and soul, to any enterprise 
so noble. Crossthwaite would ask for nothing higher, than 
to be a hewer of food and a drawer of water to an establish- 
ment of associate workmen. But alas ! his fate is fixed for 
the New World ; and mine, I verily believe, for sickness and 
the grave. And yet I will answer for it, that, in the hopes 
of helping such a project, he would give up Mackaye’s bequest, 
for the mere sake of remaining in.England ; and for me, if I 
have but a month of life, it is at the service of such men as 
you describe.” 

“ Ah !” she said, musingly, “ if poor Mackaye had but had 
somewhat more faith in the future, that fatal condition would 
perhaps never have been attached to his bequest. And yet, 
perhaps, it is better as it is. Crossthwaite’s mind may want 
quite as much as yours does, a few years of a simpler and 
brighter atmosphere to soften and refresh it again. Besides, 
your health is too weak, your life, I know, too valuable to 
your class, for us to trust you on such a voyage alone. He 
must go with you.” 

“With me?” I said. “You must be misinformed; I have 
no thought of leaving England.” 

“ You know the opinion of the physicians?” 

“ I know that my life is not likely to be a long one ; that 
imnuidiate removal to a southern, if possible to a tropical, 
climate, is considered the only means of preserving it. For the 
former, I care little ; non e&t tanti vivere. And, indeed, the 
latter, even if it would succeed, is impossible. Crossthwaite 
will live and thrive by the labor of his hands ; while, for such 
a helpless invalid as 1 to travel, would be to dissipate the little 
capital which poor Mackaye has left me.” 

“ The day will come, when society will find it profitable, 
as well as just, to put the means of preserving" life by travel 
within the reach of the poorest. But individuals must always 
begin by setting the examples, which the state, too slowly, 
though surely (for the woild i.s God’s world after all), will 
learn to copy. All is arranged for you. Crossthwaite, yon 
know, would have sailed ere now, had it not been lor your 
fever. Next week you start with him for Texas. No ; 
make no objections. All expenses are defrayed — no matter 
by whom.” 

“ By you ' by you I Who else ?” 


364 


ALTON LOCKL, TAILOR AND POET. 


“ Do you think that I monopolize the generosity of En- 
gland ? Do you think warm hearts heat only in the breasts 
of working-men ? But, if it were I, would not that be only 
another reason for submitting ? You must go. You will 
have, for the next three years, such an allowance as will sup 
port you in comfort, whether you choose to remain stationary, 
or, as I hope, to travel southward into Mexico. Your pass- 
age-money is already paid.” 

Why should I attempt to describe my feelings ? I gasped 
for breath, and looked stupidly at her for a minute or two. — 
The second darling hope of my life within my reach, just as 
the first had been snatched from me ! At last I found words. 

“ No, no, noble lady ! Do not tempt me ! Who am I, the 
slave of impulse, useless, worn out in mind and body, that you 
should waste such generosity upon me ? I do not refuse from 
the honest pride of independence ; I have not man enough left 
in me even for that. But will you, of all people, ask me to 
desert the starving, sufi'ering thousands, to whom my heart, 
my honor are engaged ; to give up the purpose of my life, and 
pamper my fancy in a luxurious paradise, while they are slav- 
ing here ?” 

“ What ] Can not God find champions for them when 
you are gone ? Has He not found them already ? Believe 
me, that Tenth of April, which you fancied the death-day, of 
liberty, has awakened a spirit in high as well as in low life, 
which children yet unborn will bless.” 

“Oh, do not mistake me 1 Have I not confessed my own 
weakness ? But if I have one healthy nerve left in me, soul 
or body, it will retain its strength only as long as it thrills 
with devotion to the people’s cause. If I live, I must live 
among them, for them. If I die, I must die at my post. I 
could not rest, except in labor. I dare not fly, like Jonah, 
from the call of God. In the deepest shade of the virgin 
forests, on the loneliest peak of the Cordilleras, He would find 
mo out ; and I should hear his still small voice reproving me, 
us it reproved the fugitive patriot-seer of old — What 'tloest 
thou here, Elijah?” 

I was excited, and spoke, 1 ;im afraid, after my custom, 
somewhat too magniloquently. But she answered o.nly with 
a quiet smile : 

“ So you are a Chartist still ?” 

“ If by a Chartist you mean one who fancies that a ch.ange 
in mere political circumstances will bring about a millennium, 
I am no longer one. That dream is gone — with others. But 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


3C5 


if to, be a Chartist is to love my brothers with every faculty of 
my soul — to wish to live and die struggling for their rights, 
endeavoring to make them, not electors merely, but fit to bo 
electors, senators, kings and priests to God and to His Christ 
— if that be the Chartism of the future, then am I seven-fold 
a Chartist, and ready to confess it before men, though I were 
thrust forth from every door in England.” 

She was silent a moment. 

“ ‘ The stone which the builders rejected is become liic 
head-stone of the corner.’ Surely the old English spirit has 
cast its madness, and begins to speak once more as it spoke in 
Naseby fights and Smithfield fires!” 

“ And yet you would quench it in me amid the enervatinif 
climate of the Tropics ?” 

“ Need it be quenched there ? Was it quenched in Drake, 
in Hawkins, and the conquerors of Hindostan ? Weakness, 
like strength, is from within, of the spirit, and not of the sun- 
shine. I would send you thither, that you may gain new 
strength, new knowledge to carry out your dream and mine. 
Do not refuse me the honor of preserving you. Do not forbid 
me to employ my wealth in the only way which reconciles 
my conscience to the possession of it. I have saved many a 
woman already ; and this one thing remained — the highest of 
all my hopes and longings — that God would allow me, ere I 
died, to save a man. I have longed to find some noble soul, 
as Carlyle says, fallen down by the way-side, and lift it up, 
and heal its wounds, and teach it the secret of its heavenly 
birthright, and consecrate it to its King in heaven. I have 
longed to find a man of the people, whom I could ttain to be 
the poet of the people.” 

“ Me at least, you have saved, have taught, have trained ' 
Oh, that your care had been bestowed on some more worthy 
object !” 

^ Let me at least, then, perfect my own work. You do 
not — it is a sign of your humility that you do not — appreciate 
the value of this rest. You underrate at once your OAvn 
powers, and the shock which they have received.” 

“ If I must go, then, why so far ? Why put you to so 
great expense ? If you must be generous, send me to some 
place nearer home — to Italy, to the coast of Devon, or the 
Isle of Wight, where invalids like me are said to find all the 
advantages which arc so often, perhaps too hastily, sought in 
foreign lands.” 

“No,” she said, smiling; “you are my servant now, by 


SC6 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND ROET. 

the laws of chivalry, and you must fulfill my quest. I have 
long hoped for a Tropic poet : one who should leave the rou- 
tine imagery of European civilization, its meagre scenery, and 
physically decrepit races, for the grandeur, the luxuriance, the 
infinite and strongly-marked variety of Tropic nature, the 
paradisaic beauty and simplicity of Tropic humanity. I am 
tired of the old images ; of the barren alternation between 
Italy and the Highlands. I had once dreamed of going to 
the Tropics myself; but my work lay elsewhere. Go for me, 
and for the people. See if you can not help to infuse some new 
blood into the aged veins of English literature ; see if you can 
not, by observing man in his mere simple and primeval state, 
bring home fresh conceptions of beauty, fresh spiritual and 
physical laws of his existence, that you may realize them here 
at home — (how, I see as yet but dimly ; but He who teaches 
the facts will surely teach their application) — in the cottages, 
in the play-grounds, the reading-rooms, the churches of work- 
ing-men.” 

“But I know so little — I have seen so little I” 

“ That very fact, I flatter myself, gives you an especial 
vocation for my scheme. Your ignorance of cultivated 
English scenery, and of Italian art, will enable you to 
approach with a more reverent, simple, and unprejudiced, 
eye, the primeval forms of beauty — God’s work, not man’s. 
Sin you will see there, and anarchy, and tyranny : but I do 
not send you to look for a society, but for nature. I do not 
send you to become a barbarian settler, but to bring home to 
the realms of civilization those ideas of physical perfection, 
which as yet, alas ! barbarism, rather than civilization, has 
preserved. Do not despise your old love for the beautiful. 
Do not fancy that because you have let it become an idol 
and a tyrant, it was not therefore the gift of God. Cherish 
it, develop it to the last ; steep your whole soul in beauty ; 
watch it in its most vast and complex harmonies, and not less 
in its most faint and fragmentary traces. Only, hitherto you 
have blindly worshiped it ; now you must learn to compre- 
hend, to master, to embody it ; to show it forth to men as 
the sacrament of Heaven, the finger-mark of God !” 

Who could resist such pleading from those lips ? I at least 
could not. 


CHAPTER XLI. 


FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND BROTHERHOOD. 

Befoke the .'same Father, the same King, crucified for all 
alike, we had partaken of the same bread and wine, we had 
prayed for the same spirit. Side by side, around the chair 
on w'hich I lay propped up with pillows, coughing my span 
of life away, had knelt the high-born countess, the cultivated 
philosopher, the repentant rebel, the wild Irish girl, her 
slavish and exclusive creed exchanged for one more free and 
dll-ernbracing ; and that no extvemest type of human con- 
dition might be wanting, the reclaimed Magdalene was 
there — two pale worn girls from Eleanor’s asylum, in whom 
1 recognized the needlewomen to whom Mackaye had taken 
me, on a memorable night seven years before. Thus — and 
how better ] — had God rewarded their loving care of that 
poor dying fellow-slave. 

Yes — we had knelt together : and I had felt that we were 
one — that there was a bond between us, real, eternal, inde- 
pendent of ourselves, knit not by man, but God ; and the 
peace of God, which passes understanding, came over me like 
the clear sunshine after weary rain. 

One by one they shook me by the hand, and quitted the 
room'; and Eleanor and I were left alone. 

“ See !” she said, “ Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood 
are come ; but not as you expected.” 

Blissful, repentant tears blinded my eyes, as I replied, not 
to her, but Him who spoke by her — 

“ Lord ! not as I will, but as thou wilt !” 

“ Y^es,” she continued, “Freedom, Equality, and Brother- 
hood are here. Realize them in thine own self, and so alone 
thou helpest to make them realities for all. Not from with- 
out, from Charters and Pwepublics, but from within, from the 
Spirit working in each; not by wrath and haste, but by 
patience made perfect through suflering, canst thou proclaim 
their good news to the groaning masses, and deliver them, as 
thy Master did before thee, by the cross, and not the sword. 
Divine paradox I Folly to the rich and mighty — the watch- 
word of the weak, in whose weakness is God’s strength made 
perfect. ‘ In your patience possess ye your souls, for the 
coming of the Lord drawclh nigh.’ Ye ? — He came then. 


868 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET 


and the Babel-tyranny of Rome fell, even as the more fearful, 
more subtle, and more diabolic tyranny of Mammon shall fall 
ere long — suicidal, even now crumbling by its innate decay. 
Yes — Babylon the Great — the commercial world of selfish 
competition, drunken with the blood of God’s people, whose 
merchandise is the bodies and souls of men — her doom is 
gone forth. And then — then — when they, the tyrants of the 
earth, who lived delicately with her, rejoicing in her sins, the 
plutocrats and bureaucrats, the money-changers and devour 
ers of labor, are crying to the rocks to hide them, and to the 
hills to cover them, from the wrath of Him that sitteth on 
the throne. Then labor shall be free at last, and the pooi 
shall eat and be satisfied, with things that eye hath not seen 
nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to 
conceive, but v/hich God has prepared for those who love 
Him. Then the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the 
Lord, as the waters cover the sea, and mankind at last shall 
own their King — Him in whom they are all redeemed into 
the glorious liberty of the Sons of God, and He shall reign in- 
deed on earth, and none but His saints shall rule beside Him. 
And then shall this sacrament be an everlasting sign to all 
the nations of the world, as it has been to you this day, of 
freedom, equality, brotherhood, of glory to God in the highest, 
and on earth peace, good-will toward men. Do you believe ?” 

Again I answered, not her, but Him who sent her — 

“ Lord, I believe ! Help thou mine unbelief !” 

“ And now, farewell. I shall not see you again before you 
start — and ere you return — My health has been fast de- 
clining lately.” 

I started — I had not dared to confess to myself how thin 
her features had become of late. I had tried not to hear the 
dry and hectic cough, or see the burning spot on either cheek 
— but it was too true ; and with a broken voice, I cried : 

“Oh that 1 might die, and join you !” 

“ Not so — I trust that you have still a work to do. But 
if not, promise me that, whatever be the event of your voyage, 
you will publish, in good time, an honest history of your life ; 
extenuating nothing, exaggerating nothing, ashamed to con- 
fess or to proclaim nothing. It may jierhaps awaken some 
rich man to look down and take pity on the brains and hearts 
more noble than his own, which lie struggling m poverty and 
misguidance, among these foul sties, which civilization rears 
— and calls them cities. Now, once again, farewell 1” 

She held out her hand — I would have fallen at her feet, 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


XVJ 

but the thouglit of that common sacrament withheld me. ] 
seized her liaiid. covered it with adoring kisses — Slowly she 
Withdrew it, and glided from the room — 

What need of more words ? I obeyed her — sailed — and 
here I am. 


Yes ! 1 have seen the land ! Like a purple fringe upon 
the golden water, “ while the parting day dies like the dol- 
phin,” there it lay upon the far horizon — the great young 
(ree New World ! — and every tree and flower and insect on 

it new ! — a wonder and a joy — which I shall never see 

No — I shall never reach the land. I felt it all along. 
Weaker and weaker, day by day, wdth bleeding lungs and 
failing limbs, 1 have traveled the ocean-paths. The iron has 

entered too deeply into my soul 

Hark ! Merry voices on deck are welcoming their future 
home. Laugh on, happy ones ! — come out of Egypt and the 
house of bondage, and the waste and howling wilderness of 
slavery and competition, workhouses and prisons, into a good 
land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey, where 
you will sit every one under his own vine and his own fig-tree, 
and look into the faces of your rosy children — and see in them 
a blessing and not a curse ! Oh, England ! stern mother- 
land, when wilt thou renew thy youth ? Thou wilderness 

of man’s making, not God’s ! Is it not written, that 

the day shall come when the forest shall break forth into sing- 
ing, and the wilderness shall blossom like the rose 'I 

Hark ! again, sweet and clear, across the still night sea, 
ring out the notes of Crossthwaite’s bugle — the first luxury, 
poor fellow, he ever allowed himself; and yet not a selfish 
one, for music, like mercy, is twice blessed — 

It blcsscth him that gives and him that takes. 

There is the spirit-stirring marching air of the German work- 
men students : 


Thou, thou, thou, and thou, 

Sir Master, fare thee well. 

Perhaps a half reproachful hint to the poor old England he 
is leaving. What a glorious metre ! warming one’s whole 
heart into life and energy ! If I could but write in such a 
metre one true people’s song, that should embody all my sor- 
row', indignation, hope — fitting last w'ords for a poet of the 
people — for they will be my last W'ords — Well — thank God ' 


S70 ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND PORT. 

at least I shall not be buried in a London church-yard ! It 
may be a foolish fancy — but I have made them promise to 
lay me up among the virgin woods, where, if the soul ever 
visits the place of its body’s rest, 1 may snatch glimpses of 
that natural beauty from which I w'as barred out in life, and 
watch the gorgeous flowers that bloom above my dust, and 
hear the forest birds sing around the Poet’s grave. 

Hark to the grand lilt of the “ Good Time Coming !” — 
Song which has cheered ten thousand hearts, which has 
already taken root that it may live and grow forever — fitting 
melody to soothe my dying ears ! Ah ! how should there not 
be A Good Time Coming 1 Hope, and trust, and infinite 
deliverance ! — a time such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard, 
nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive ! — com- 
ing surely, soon or late, to those for whom a God did not dis- 
dain to die ! 


Our only remaining duty is to give an extract from a letter 
written by John Crossthwaite, and dated 

Galveston, Texas, Oct., 1848. 

“I am happy. Katie is ’ happy. There is 

peace among us here, like ‘the clear downshining after rain.’ 
But 1 thirst and long already for the expiration of my seven 
years’ exile, wholesome as I believe it to be. My only wish 
is to return and assist in the Emancipation of Labor, and give 
my small aid in that fraternal union of all classes which I 
hear is surely, though slowly, spreading in my mother-land. 

“ And now for my poor friend, whose papers, according to 
my promise to him, I transmit to you. On the very night 
on which he seems to have concluded them — an hour after 
we had made the land — we found him in his cabin, dead, his 
head resting on the table as peacefully as if he had slumbered. 
On a sheet of paper by him were written the following verses ; 
the ink was not yet dry : 

“ ‘ MY LAST WORDS. 

I. 

“ ‘ Weep, weep, weep, and weep. 

For pauper, dolt, and slave; 

Hark ! from wasted moor and fen, 

Feverous alley, workhouse den, 

Swells the wail of Englishmen ; 

“ Work ! or the grave !” 


ALTON LOCKE, TAILOR AND POET. 


371 


II. 

“ ‘ Down, down, down, and down. 

With idler, knave, and tyrant ; 

Why for sluggards stint and moil ? 

He that will not live by toil 
Has no right on English soil ; 

God’s word ’s our warrant ! 

III. 

** ‘Up, up, up, and up, 

Face your game, and play it ! 

The night is past — behold the sun ’ — 
The cup is full, the web is spun. 

The Judge is set, the doom begun. 
Who shall stay it?”’ 


THE END. • 


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CHARLES KINGSLEY’S WORKS 


Mr. Kingsley revels in the gorgeous ^yealtll of the West Indian vegeta- 
tion, bringing before us one marvel after another, alternately sating and 
piquing our curiosity. Whether we climb the cliffs with him and peer 
over into the narrow bays which are being hollowed out by the trade surf, 
or wander through forests where the tops of the trees form a green cloud 
overhead, or gaze down glens which are watered by the clearest brooks, 
running through masses of palm and banana, and all the rich variety of 
foliage, we are equally delighted and amazed. — Atlienmim^ London. 

The comments of the author on the social condition of the islands, 
whose natural beauties afforded such exquisite delight to every sense, pre- 
sent many original suggestions. But the strength of his Avork, as well as 
its peculiar charm, consists in his description of the animal and vegetable 
life, in the luxuriant wealth of which he revels with all the ardor of a ve- 
hement, poetical nature. — N. Y. Tribune. 

Very interesting, and attractive alike to the scientific naturalist, the pel 
itician, and the general reader. — Globe., London. 

ALTON LOCKE. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet. 
An Autobiography. 12nio, Cloth, 75 cents; Paper, 25 
cents. 

HYPATIA ; or, New Foes with an Old Face. A Novel. 
4to, Paper, 20 cents. 

YEAST. A Problem. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents. 

WEST INDIES. At Last: a Christmas in the West 
Indies. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50. 


Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

IlARPEn & Brotuebs will send the above woi-ks by mail, postage prepaid, to any 
part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 


UPLAND AND MEADOW. 

A Poaetquissings Chronicle. By Charles C. Abbott, 
M.D. pp. x.,398. 12rao, Ornamental Cloth, $1 50. 

Dr. Abbott studies most delightfully the question of whether birds re- 
main with us during the winter'; w'hether hibernation is as fixed a habit 
with any creature as is supposed. Then follow studies of the habits of 
marsh -wrens, graldes, red -birds, toads, humming-birds; and an autumn 
diary remarkably full of interest and with many delightfully poetical hab- 
its of expression, together with accounts of conversations with the country 
people so quaint and curious as to give a great personal interest to these 
studies. Any one with the slightest interest in natural history will be 
charmed with this book ; and those who care very little for natural his- 
tory in itself will find so much other matter that whoever and of whatever 
turn of mind takes up this book Avill not willingly lay it down. — Christian 
A dvocate^ N. Y. 

We commend this book as inspiring, refreshing, and delightful in its 
record and humor both. — Philadelphia Ledger and Transcript. 

The author has a faculty for using his eyes and ears to excellent advan- 
tage in his rambles over “ Upland and Meadow,” and a very entertaining 
way of recording what he sees and hears. ... It is worth reading indeed. 
— The Examhm'^ N. Y. 

Here is a modern Thoreau with an imagination the like of whith Tho- 
reau did not possess. Things happen to him in the most accommodating 
Avay, for they manage to give each story of bird or beast a point. — N. Y. 
Times. 

Delightful reading for students and lovers of out-door nature. . . . Here 
the author discourses with the greatest charm of style about wood and 
stream, marsh-wrens, the spade-foot toad, summer, winter, trumpet-creepers 
and ruby throats, September sunshine, a colony of grakles, the queer little 
dwellers in the water, and countless other things that the ordinary eye 
passes by without notice. . . . The book may be heartily commended to 
every reader of taste, and to every admirer of graceful and nervous Eng- 
lish. — Saturday Evening Gazette^ Boston. 


Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

tfS~ IIauper & Bbothkes will send the above work by mail, postage prepaid, to 
any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. 


SOME POPULAR NOVELS 

PubUshed by HAEPER & BROTHERS New York, 


The Octavo Paper Novels in this list may be obtained in half-binding [leather backs 
and pasteboard sides], suitable for Public and Circulating Libraries, at 35 cents 
per volume, in addition to the prices named below. The 32mo Paper Novels may be 
obtained in Cloth, at 15 cents per volume in addition to the prices named below. 

For a FuLt List op Novels published by Harper & Brotheus, see Harper’s New 
AND Kevised Catalogue, which will be sent by mail, postage pi'epaid, to any ad- 
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BAKER’S (Rev. W. M.) C.-irter Quarterman. Illustrated 8vo, Paper $ 60 

Inside : a Chronicle of Secession, Illustrated 8 vo, Paper 1b 

The New Timothy 12mo, Cloth, $1 60 ; 4to, Paper 25 

The Virginians in Texas 8vo, Paper 75 

BENEDICT’S (F. L.) John Worthington’s Name 8vo, Paper 75 

Miss Dorothy’s Charge 8vo, Paper 76 

Miss Van Kortland 8vo, Paper 60 

My Daughter Elinor 8vo, Paper 80 

St. Simon’s Niece 8vo, Paper 60 

BESANT’S (W.) All in a Garden Fair 4to, Paper 20 

BESANT & RICE’S All Sorts and Conditions of Men 4to, Paper 20 

By Celia’s Arbor. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 60 

Shepherds All and Maidens Fair 32mo, Paper 25 

“ So they were Married !” Illustrated 4to, Paper 20 

Sweet Nelly, My Heart’s Delight 4to, Paper 10 

The Captains’ Room 4to, Paper 10 

The Chaplain of the Fleet 4to, Paper 20 

The Golden Butterfly 8vo, Paper 40 

’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay 32mo, Paper 20 

When the Ship Comes Home '. 32mo, Paper 25 

BLACK’S rW.) A Daughter of Heth . 12mo, Cloth, ^1 26 ; 8vo, Paper 36 


Judith Shakespeare. Ill’d 

Kilmeny 

Macleod of Dare. Illustrated. 


Shandon Bells. Illustrate! 

Sunrise 

That Beautiful Wretch. J 

The Maid of Killeena, and Other Stories 8vo, Paper 40 

The Monarch of Mincing-Lane. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 60 

The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton, 12mo, Cloth, $1 25 ; 8vo, Pa. 60 

Three Feathers. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, $1 25; 8vo, Paper 60 

White Heather 12mo, Cloth, 125; 4to, Paper 20 

White Wings, Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, 125; 4 to, Paper 20 



1 25; 

8vo, Paper 

60 

. . 12mo, Cloth, 

1 25; 

8vo, Paper 

60 


1 25; 

8vo, Paper 

35 


1 25; 

4 to. Paper 

20 


1 26; 

8vo, Paper 
8vo, Paper 

35 

12mo, Cloth, 

1 25; 

60 


4to, Paper 

16 


1 25; 

8vo, Paper 

60 


1 25; 

4to, Paper 

20 

. . 12mo, Cloth, 

1 25; 

4to, Paper 

16 

,..12mo, Cloth, 

1 25; 

4to, Paper 

20 


2 


Harper cC* Brothers’ Popular Novels. 


BLACK’S (W.) Yolande. Illustrated... 12rao, Cloth, $1 25; 4to, Paper 

BLACKMORE’S (R. D.) Alice Lorraine 8vo, Paper 

Christowell 4to, Paper 

Clara Vaughan 4to, Paper 

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Erema 8vo, Paper 

Lorna Boone 12mo, Cloth, $1 00 ; 8vo, Paper 

Mary Anerley 16mo, Cloth, 100; 4 to. Paper 

The Maid of Sker 8vo, Paper 

Tommy Upmore 16mo, Cloth, 60 cts.; Paper, 36 cts.; 4to, Paper 

BRADDON’S (Miss) An Open Verdict 8vo, Paper 

A Strange World 8vo, Paper 

Asphodel 4to, Paper 

Aurora Floyd 8vo, Paper 

Barbitra; or. Splendid Misery 4to, Paper 

Birds of Prey. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

Bound to John Company. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

Charlotte’s Inheritance 8vo, Paper 

Cut by the County 16mo, Paper 

Dead Men’s Shoes 8vo, Paper 

Dead Sea Fruit. Illustrated 8vo’, Paper 

Eleanor’s Victory 8vo| Paper 

Fenton’s Quest. Illustrated 8vo| Paper 

Flower and Weed ...V....4to| Paper 

Hostages to Fortune. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

Ishmacl Paper 

John Marchmont’s Legacy 8vo, Paper 

Joshua Haggard’s Daughter. Illustrated 8vo| Paper 

Just as I Am 4 tQ^ Paper 

Lost for Love. Illustrated 8vo Paper 

Mistletoe Bough, 1 8’78. Edited by M. E. Braddon. . .V. *.V.4to’ Paper 

Mistletoe Bough, 18V9. Edited by M. E. Braddon. 4to, Paper 

Mistletoe Bough, 1884. Edited by M. E. Braddon 4to Paper 

Mount Royal 4 to’ Paper 

Phantom Fortune Paper 

Strangers and Pilgrims. Illustrated ..’.’..!’*.*."8vo’ Paner 

The Levels of Arden. Illustrated 8vo’ Paner 

To the Bitter End. Illustrated 8vo’ Paner 

Under the Red Flag .‘i.'.^.'^.-.'i.Uto: Pa^ 

Weavers and Weft Papm’ 

BREAD-WINNERS, THE "”l6mo clnth 

BRONTE’S (Charlotte) Jane Eyre. Illustrated cloih 

4to, Paper, 15 cents; 8 vo,’ Paper 


rEici 

I 2C 
6C 
20 

15 
00 
50 
60 
26 

16 
60 
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15 
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1 00 

1 00 
40 


Harper & Brothers' Popular Novels, 


3 


BRONTE’S (Charlotte) Shirley. Ill’d . . 12mo, Cloth, $1 00 ; 8vo, Paper $ 60 

The Professor. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, $1 00; 4to, Paper 

Villette. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, $1 00; 8 vo. Paper 

P»R0NTE’S (Anne) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ill’d... . 1 2mo, CHoth 1 

BRONTE’S (Emily) Wuthering Heights. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth 1 

BULWER’S (Lytton) A Strange Story. Illustrated 12ino, Cloth ] 

8vo, Paper 

Devereux 8vo, Paper 

Ernest Maltravers ! 8vo, Paper 

Godolphin 8vo, Paper 

Kenelm Chillingly 12mo, Cloth, $1 25 ; 8vo, Paper 

Leila 12ino, Cloth, J 

Night and Morning 8vo, Paper 

Paul Clilford 8vo, Paper 

Pausanias the Spartan 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents ; 8vo, Paper 

Pelham 8vo, Paper 

Rienzi 8vo, Paper 

The Caxtons 12mo, Cloth ] 

The Coming Race, 12mo, Cloth, 100; 12mo, Paper 

The Last Days of Pompeii 8vo, Paper, 25 cents ; 4to, Paper 

The Parisians. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, $1 60; 8vo, Paper 

The Pilgrims of the Rhino 8vo, Paper 

What will He do with it? 8vo, Paper 

Zanoni 8vo, Paper ■ 

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After Dark, and Other Stores. — Antonina. — Armadale. — Basil. — 
Hide-and-Seek. — Man and Wife. — My Miscellanies. — No Name. 

— Poor Miss Finch. — Tlie Dead Secret. — The Law and the Lady. 

— The Moonstone. — The New Magdalen. — The Queen of Hearts. 

— The Two Destinies. — The Woman in White. 

Antonina 8vo, Paper 

Armadale. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

“ I Say No ”.16mo. Cloth, 60 cts. ; 16mo, Paper, 35 cts. ; 

Man and Wife . . 4to, Paper 

My Lady’s Money 32mo, Paper 

No Name. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

Percy and the Prophet 32mo, Paper 

Poor Miss Finch. Illustrated 8vo, Cloth, $1 10; 

The Law and the Lady. Illustrated 

The Moonstone. Illustrated 

The New Magdalen 8vo, Paper 

The Two Destinies. Illustrated 

The Woman in White. Illustrated 

CR AIK’S (Miss G. M.) Anne Warwick 8vo, Paper 

Dorcas 4to, Paper 

Fortune’s Marriage 4to, Paper 

Godfrey Helstone 4 to. Paper 

Hard to Bear 8vo, Paper 

Mildred 8vo, Pape 


1 


20 

60 

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20 


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32mo, Paper 

25 


60 

32mo, Paper 

20 

8 VO, Paper 

60 


50 


60 


30 

...8 VO, Paper 

35 


60 


26 


15 


20 


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4 


Harper c& Brothers' Popular Novels. 


CR AIK’S (Miss G. M.) Sydney 4to, Paper | 15 

Sylvia’s Choice 8vo, Paper 30 

TwoAVomen ....4to, Paper 15 

DICKENS’S (Charles) Works. Household Edition. Illustrated. 8vo. 

Set of 16 vols., Cloth, in box 22 00 


A Tale of Two Cities.Paper $ 50 
Cloth 1 00 

Barnaby Rudge Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 50 

Bleak House Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 50 
Christmas Stories. ...Paper 1 00 
Cloth 1 50 
David Copperfield. ..Paper 1 00 
Cloth 1 50 

DombeyandSon Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 50 
Great Expectations... Paper 1 00 
Cloth 1 50 

Little Dorrit Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 60 
Martin Chuzzlewit.... Paper 1 00 


Martin Chuzzlewit Cloth 1 60 

Nicholas Nickleby Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 60 

Oliver Twist Paper 60 

Cloth 1 00 

Our Mutual Friend Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 60 

Pickwick Papers Paper 1 00 

Cloth 1 60 

Pictures from Italy, Sketches by 
Boz, American Notes ...Paper 1 00 
Cloth 1 60 

The Old Curiosity Shop... Paper 76 

Cloth 1 25 

Uncommercial Traveller, Hard 
Times, Edwin Brood. ..Paper 


Cloth 1 


00 

60 

20 

10 

25 

26 
10 
60 
60 
60 
76 
10 
10 
15 
15 


Pickwick Papers 4to, Paper 

The Mudfog Papers, &c 4to, Paper 

Mystery of Edwin Drood. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

Hard Times 8vo, Paper 

Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy 8vo, Paper 

DE MILLE’S A Castle in Spain. Iird....8vo, Cloth, $1 00 ; 8vo, Paper 

Cord and Creese. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

The American Baron. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

The Cryptogram. Illustrated 8vo, Paper 

The Dodge Club. Illustrated... .8 vo. Paper, 60 cents ; 8vo, Cloth 1 
The Living Link. Illustrated. ...8 vo. Paper, 60 cents ; 8vo, Cloth 1 

DISRAELI’S (Earl of Beaconsfield) Endymion 4to, Paper 

The Young Duke 12mo, Cloth, $1 50; 4to, Paper 

ELIOT’S (George) Works. Lib. Ed. 12 vols. Iird...l2mo, Cl., per vol. 1 25 

Popular Edition. 12 vols. Illustrated 12mo, Cloth, per vol. 75 

Adam Bode. — Daniel Deronda, 2 vols. — Essays and Leaves from a 
Note-Book. — Felix Holt, the Radical. — Middlemarch, 2 vols. — 
Romola. — Scenes of Clerical Life, atvi Silas Marner. — The Mill 
on the Floss. — Poems : with Brother Jacob and The Lifted Veil. 
Fireside Edition. Containing the above in 6 vols. {Sold only in 

Sets.) ■ 12mo, Cloth 

Adam IBede. Illustrated 4to, Paper 

Amos Barton 3 2 mo. Paper 

Brother Jacob. — The Lifted Veil 32mo, Paper 

Daniel Deronda 8vo, Paper 

Felix Holt, the Radical. 8vo, Paper 

Janet’s Repentance 32mo, Paper 


7 50 
25 
20 
20 
50 
60 
20 


Harper <& Brothers' Popular Hovels. 


o 


jiLIOT’S (George) Middlemarch 

j Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story 

, Itomola. Illustrated 

I Siliis Marner 

I Scenes of Clerical Life 

1 Tke Mill on the Floss 

ijD\VARDS’S (A. B.) Barlxira’s History 

Debenham’s Vow. Illustrated..." 

Half a Million of Money 

' Lord Brackenbury 

Miss Carew 

My Brother’s Wife 

jD WARDS’S (M. B.) Disarmed 

Exchange No Robbery 

Kitty 

Pearla 

. The Flower of Doom, and Other Stories 

’jARJEON’S An Island Pearl. Illustrated 

At the Sign of the Silver Flagon 

Blado-o’-Grass. Illustrated 

Brcad-and-Cheese and Kisses. Illustrated 

Golden Grain. Illustrated 

Great Porter Square 

Jessie Trim 

Joshua Marvel 

Love’s Harvest 

Love’s Victory 

Shadows on the Snow. Illustrated 

The Bells of Pen raven 

; The Duehess of Rosemary Lane 

J The King of No-Land. Illustrated 

lASKELL’S (Mrs.) Cousin Phillis 

Cranford 

Mary Barton 8vo, Paper, 40 cents ; 

Moorland Cottage 

My Lady Ludlow 

Right at Last, &c 

Sylvia’s Lovers 

Wives and Daughters. Illustrated 

IBBON’S (C.) A Hard Knot 

A Heart’s Problem -. 

i By Mead and Stream 

1 For Lack of Gold 

? For the King 

^ Heart’s Delight 

In Honor Bound 

Of High Degree 

I Robin Gray 

^ Queen of the Meadow. 


PEIOB 

..32mo, Paper 

20 


50 

,.12mo, Paper 

20 


60 


50 


60 


50 


60 


16 


36 


25 


15 


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.IGmo, Paper 

25 


30 


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35 


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20 


20 


30 


10 


35 


25 


20 

,.16mo. Cloth 1 

25 

4to, Paper 

20 

.18mo, Cloth 

'75 


20 

.12mo, Cloth 1 

50 


40 


GO 

12mo, Paper 

25 


10 


20 


35 


30 


20 


35 


20 

. .8vo, Paper 

85 


15 


6 Harper d Brothers' Popular Novels. 


PRI 

GIBBON’S (C.) The Braes of Yarrow 4to, Paper $ t 

Tlie Golden Shaft 4to, Paper 

HARDY’S (Thos.) Fellow-Townsmen 32tno, Paper i 

A Laodicean. 'Illustrated 4to, Paper 

Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid 4to, Paper j 

HARRISON’S (Mrs.) Golden Rod 32mo, Paper i 

Helen Troy 16mo, Cloth 1 ( 

HAY’S (M. C.) A Dark Inheritance 32nio, Paper ] 

A Shadow on the Threshold 32mo, Paper i 

Among the Rufns, and Other Stories 4to, Paper 1 

At the Seaside, and Other Stories 4to, Paper 1 

Back to the Old Home 32mo, Paper 1 

Bid Me Discourse 4to, Paper ] 

Dorothy’s Venture 4to, Paper ] 

For Her Dear Sake 4to, Paper ] 

Hidden Perils 8vo, Paper S 

Into the Shade, and Other Stories 4to, Paper ] 

Lady Carmichael’s Will 32mo, Paper 1 

Lester’s Secret 4to, Paper i 

Missing 32mo, Paper i 

My First Offer, and Other Stories 4to, Paper ] 

Nora’s Love Test 8vo, Paper i 

Old Myddelton’s Money 8vo, Paper ‘ 

Reaping the Whirlwind 32mo, Paper i 

The Arundel Motto 8vo, Paper S 

The Sorrow of a Secret 32mo, Paper 1 

The Squire’s Legacy 8vo, Paper i 

Under Life’s Key, and Other Stories 4to, Paper ] 

Victor and Vanquished 8vo, Paper i 

HOEY’S (Mrs. C.) A Golden Sorrow 8vo, Paper 4 

All or Nothing 4to, Paper ] 

Kate Cronin’s Dowry 32ino, Paper ] 

The Blossoming of an Aloe ; 8vo, Paper 

The Lover’s Creed 4to, Paper 

The Question of Cain 4 to, Paper 

HUGO’S (Victor) Ninety-Three. Ill’d. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50 ; 8 vo. Paper 

The Toilers of the Sea. Ill’d 8vo, Cloth, 1 50 ; 8vo, Paper 

JAMES’S (Henry, Jun.) Daisy Miller 82mo, Paper 

An International Episode 32mo, Paper 

Diary of a Man of Fifty, and A Bundle of Letters 32ino, Paper 

I'he four above-mentidned works in one volume 4to, Paper 

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